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THE 



ETHICS OF POSITIVISM 

A 

CRITICAL STUDY. 



7 

GIACOMO BAKZELLOTTI, 

PROFESSOr, OP PHILOSOPHY AT THE LICEO DANTE. FLORENCE. 




NEW YORK: 
CHARLES P. SOMERBY, 

1 39 Eighth Street. 

1878. 



Copyrighted, 
By C. P. Somerby, 
18T8. 



C. P. Somerby, 
Electrotyper and Printer, 
139 Eighth-st., N. Y. 



SYNOPSIS OF CONTEXTS. 



PART I. 

I. Recent scientific development of Positive doc- 
trines, and the mental conditions which favored that 
development. Important part of Positivism in Ethics. 
The two conceptions of Liberty and Good. 

II. The ideas of Experience and of Law in the Posi- 
tive School ; Determinism and its origin. 

m. Two extreme views in the question of Liberty ; 
and how the Positivists have assumed an intermediate 
position between those two views. Arguments by which 
the Positivists apply the method of Experience to the 
doctrine of "Will. Alexander Bain. The consequences 
of Positive Ethics in England. 

IY. John S. Mill. His doctrines on voluntary action. 
Laws and necessity of voluntary action. Mill's views on 
human character. Contradictions. 

Y. Criticism of previous doctrines ; their novelty ; 
the scope of the ideas of cause and force. Positivists ad- 
mit interior observation, but have no definite conception 
of what it is. What their conception of interior observ- 
ation is. Psychology assumes the character of a Natural 
History of the Mind in the English School. 

YI. A judgment on the conclusions of the new phi- 



iv 



Synopsis of Contents _ 



losophers on the question of the Will. Their conclusions 
imply, by ultimate analysis, a tacit denial of conscience. 

VII. Conclusion ; historical significance of Determin- 
ism ; the limits of human liberty. 

PART II. 

I. The idea of the human act, as we form it from the 
analysis of free-will, gives us the moral end. 

II. The theory of the end in ancient philosophy, in 
the Middle Ages and in contemporary English Schools. 
Definition of the school of Intuition and of Utilitarianism. 
The theory of absolute obligation opposed to Material- 
ism and to Independent Morality. Inductive Morality of 
the Positivists. An observation of Lecky. 

III. Historical notice of the progress of the doctrine 
of the good in England up to the latest form into which 
it has been put by Positivism • Hobbes, Cudworth, 
Clarke, Locke, Butler, Hutcheson ; the Scotch School. 

IV. The Scotch prevail in the question of the origin 
and nature of disinterested feelings. Hume and Price. 

V. The theory of association in relation to morality. 
Its development due to the need of opposing absolute 
morality by a vigorous method. The tradition of con- 
temporary moral egotism to the age of improvement in 
the school of inductive morality ; Mandeville. Brown, 
Paley and Bentham. They carry Inductive Ethics to 
the degree of scientific maturity in which Positivism 
found it. 

VI. Prevalence of Utilitarian morality in the English 
doctrines at present. The opposite school and its repre- 
sentatives. Fundamental principles of Utilitarianism 
and their progress up to the time of Mill. Objections to 
Utilitarianism. Utilitarian idea of Happiness. 

VII-VIII. Examination of the philosophical process 
by which the Positive School believes it has laid new 



Synopsis of Contents. 



v 



foundations for the Utilitarian doctrine. A criticism of 
John S. Mill's Utilitarianism. 

IX. The theory resting on the analysis and reduction 
of ethical phenomena examined in relation to the method 
of the philosophy of which it is a part, and in relation 
also to the general movement of scientific thought. Such 
a movement begins with Galileo and leads to the concep- 
tion of the unity of phenomena. 

X. Influence of the scientific movement on psychol- 
ogy. In England, after Bacon, there prevails analysis : 
in Germany, after Kant, reduction. The English psy- 
chologists pursue an intermediate path. They do not 
endeavor to reduce psychical activity to its organs, or 
psychology to physiology. They endeavor to reduce the 
various forms of psychical force between themselves, and all of 
these forms to one common source — feeling. Association re- 
ferred to again as the fundamental law of English psy- 
chology. A demonstration of the progress of the idea of 
that law since the age of Hartley. James Mill, John S. 
Mill, Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer. 

XII. Organism of English psychology. 

XIII. The method of reduction and the doctrine of the 
end and of happiness as expounded in Utilitarianism. 

XIV. Criticism of the theory of association. 

XV. Effects of this criticism on the doctrine of the 
Good. 

XVI. The ideas of the Just and of Absolute Morality. 

XVII. Historical genesis of moral consciousness as 
explained by Positivism. Man and the Moral Sciences. 
by Aristide Gabelli. 

XVIII. The question is asked whether such psycho- 
logical analysis as exposed so far is enough to establish 
a new and real moral science. Herbert Spencer's objec- 
tions to empirical Utilitarianism. Conclusion. 



vi 



Synopsis of Contents. 



PART III. 

I. The Positive doctrines in France, in England and 
in Italy in the first half of this century. 

II. Italian Positivism. 

III. In the Course of Positive Philosophy, by Comte, 
and in the meetings of other Positivists in France, 
there is not a true morality. Morality cannot be desumed 
from Social feeling as it is understood by Comte. He 
makes it impossible to establish a science of character. 

IV. An explanation of the reason why this work 
treats almost exclusively of the English doctrines. 

V-VI. A general outline of the history of Criticism, 
from the Renaissance to Kant, is given in order to show 
its connection with the contemporary doctrines of Posi- 
tivism. Conclusion that Comte, too, takes his starting- 
point in Kant ; but, as the disciple of French Sensualism 
and Materialism, he only finds in phenomena experi- 
mental and empirical elements, thus approaching Locke 
and Hume. 

VII. Positivism results in two tendencies. 

VIII. The importance that Positivists should become 
fully conscious of the past. Condition sine qua non of 
the progress of philosophy. 

IX. Insufficient application in England of the experi- 
mental method since Bacon and Hobbes. 

X. Summary. Criticism and Positivism in Science. 

XI. Their consequences in public and private life«c 



AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 



Lsr introducing to the American public this 
book, which is published in English for the first 
time, principally through the kind initiative and 
intelligent cooperation of Miss Ida Lilian Olcott, 
I deem it necessary to refer to the occasion and 
time of its production, to its purpose and to 
the considerations which have led me to com- 
ply with the kind request of the translators, with 
the hope that their work would prove of some 
use and pleasure to the students of Philosophy. 

Although the Ethics of Positivism 1 is one of 
those works which treat of questions of general 
scientific interest, there is a certain occasion for 

1 La morale nella jilosofia posiiiva ; studio critico di 
Giacomo Barzellotti, Professore di Filosofia nel Regio 
Liceo Dante di Firenze. M. Cellini e C 1 ., Florence 
1871. 



viii Preface. 

them, as it is seen from the form in which they 
are conceived, and from the motives which in- 
spire them. It was originally published by in- 
stallments during the years 1870 and 1871 in La 
Filosofia delle Scuole Ttaliane, a philosophical 
periodical founded by the illustrious philosopher 
Terenzio Mamiani. From the first I denomi- 
nated my work a critical study, with the 
aim of defending, in the first place, the princi- 
ples of Morality against the attacks of an em- 
pirical Utilitarianism. This I have endeavored 
to do without any theological postulate, but 
on what I conceive to be the grounds of abso- 
lute obligation, and showing, by a broad and 
impartial criticism of the opposite doctrines, that 
those of the above referred to school have not, 
as yet, proved that a system of morality can be 
established on scientific bases. In the second 
place, I wished to present to the Italian public 
a sufficiently exact account of the most import- 
ant results which empirical Psychology had 
reached through the latest investigations of 
the facts of the moral world. It is clear that, 
in order that I might succeed in my double 



Preface. ix 

purpose, it was necessary that I should make 
the doctrines of the English experimental school 
the principal subject of my critical study. It 
is the only school in Europe which had pre- 
viously, and at that time also, applied the prin- 
ciples of the scientific method to all the depart- 
ments of Philosophy, and particularly to Psy- 
chology and Morality ; and freely following the 
traditions of Locke, Hume and Hartley, that 
school pursued a path which led it every day 
farther from the so-called Positive course of 
Auguste Comte. This profound difference of 
origin and direction, which distinguishes the 
doctrines of the French philosopher from those 
of John Stuart Mill, Alexander Bain, Herbert 
Spencer and other English psychologists was 
not for a long time sufficiently recognized in my 
country. When I wrote in the original the 
following pages, the doctrines of Positivism 
were hardly known here ; all that was heard 
of them being through the reports of the dis- 
cussions which they were at that time exciting 
in France. There was not then in this country 
a school, properly so called, which professed 



x Preface. 

them with unity of principles and convictions, 
or with a full comprehension of its own method. 

In the name of Positivism was confounded, as 
there still is by many, different and even opposed 
philosophical directions, provided that there was 
implied in them the exclusion of old metaphys- 
ical notions ; no distinction being made between 
Materialism and the Empiricism of physiologists 
with whom Comte was in accord, and the doc- 
trines of the English experimental school which 
refused, and still refuses, to be known as Posi- 
tive. As I have remarked, the doctrines of this 
school were not well known in Italy at that time, 
so that confusion was inevitable. The majority 
of Italian readers were wanting in serious philo- 
sophical training, in that fine sense of modern 
scientific tendency which is necessary to prop- 
erly comprehend the position, or, rather, the 
decided attitude, of the English school of experi- 
mentalists in the history of contemporary philos- 
ophy, in relation to the two extremes in Europe, 
of materialism on one hand, and metaphysical 
and theological dogmatism on the other. 

One of the principal ends I had in view 



Preface. xi 

when I undertook to write this work was, there- 
fore, to dissipate the strange confusion of criteria 
and conceptions which appeared to exist in the 
minds of Positivists, at least of those who called 
themselves such in Italy ; and, while I had to 
sincerely reject most of the doctrines of that 
school, I had to at once combat and repre- 
sent them, so that they would be better under- 
stood and appreciated in Italy, at least in their 
most prominent features, in the spirit and depth 
of their method. I. wanted thus to put them 
before my countrymen in that true point of 
historical perspective to which they belong, 
distinguishing them more especially from the 
Empiricism of physiologists and from the Posi- 
tive school as founded by Auguste Comte. 
While the above avowed purpose still makes 
my book, in one sense, opportune in Italy, I 
trust it will not make it appear altogether in- 
opportune in America, where, I doubt not, a 
mere exposition of the Positive doctrines is no 
longer so necessary as it is in some other conn- 
tries. 

The occasion and purpose of the book sug- 



xii Preface. 

gested its title. But I cannot but remark that 
the appellation of Positivism^ which I gave to 
the Philosophy which I then proposed to ex- 
amine, was commented upon as inexact by the 
eminent writers who criticised the work in the 
leading reviews of both England and Germany. 
It is not necessary to say that such a philos- 
ophy I found represented principally by the 
English school, for I believe I have suffi- 
ciently shown it in the course of my discus- 
sion. I wish to refer to two of those critics, 
for whom I have a deep sense of gratitude. 
They are Mr. Herbert Spencer, who alluded 
to this book in the eighth chapter of his Study 
of Sociology ; and the distinguished author of 
the Methods of Ethics, Professor Sidgwick, 
who criticised it at length in the Academy for 
July 1, 1872. The remarks of the latter were 
at once favorable and truly severe, and I have 
not failed to profit by them, inasmuch as I have 
ratified with pleasure some errors into which 
I had fallen. I have not, however, changed 
the title of the book, in order that it might 
not lose any of the character of what I would 



Preface. xiii 

call local opportunity which it received from 
the occasion on which I wrote it, and from 
the special intellectual conditions of Italian 
readers, which it presupposed and on which 
it was intended to act. The term Positivism, 
with which I designated also the doctrines of 
the English experimental school, was then one 
of the terms most used in Italy to signify those 
doctrines. Although I admit that the word was 
misused in this sense, I accepted it provision- 
ally, and only to make myself understood by 
those for whom the book was more especially 
intended; while it was my purpose, at the 
same time, to substitute a very clear and precise 
notion of the subject itself for the provisionally 
and inaccurate meaning of the word. 

It seems to me to be necessary that I should 
reply briefly to the grave criticism which the 
authoritative author, to whom I have before 
alluded, published in the Academy of London. 
He imputes to me that I have been led to mis- 
takes through the authority of Mr. Lecky, from 
whose fine History of European Morals from 
Augustus to Charlemagne I quote a few words. 



xiv Preface. 

The blunder which the distinguished Profes- 
sor believes I have made is that I have con- 
founded "the egotistic and universalistic Hedon- 
ism under the common term of Utilitarianism," 
and in considering " the ethical controversy that 
extends from Socrates to the present time as 
a dialogue between two schools of thought, ' In- 
tuitivists' and 'Utilitarians'"; which mistake, 
Professor Si dg wick says, has caused me to fall 
into the other error of considering "the differ- 
ence between Epicurus, Hobbes and Helvetius, 
on the one hand, and Bentham and Comte, on 
the other, as quite secondary and subordinate." 
Now, to me, it seems that Professor Sidgwick has 
perhaps not sufficiently noticed how my polemic, 
as a whole, against Utilitarianism, and my ex- 
position of the controversy on the moral ques- 
tion as it was agitated in England in the sev- 
enteenth and eighteenth centuries, make it clear 
that, in appreciating the respective value of 
the various doctrines and their historical rela- 
tions, I follow — in conformity to the nature and 
to the principal aim of my work — an essentially 
theoretical mode of criticism, and that this con- 



Preface. xv 

sists, for me, in the impossibility of deducing 
the binding force of human acts from the con- 
ception of the useful or of happiness in any 
sense in which we may understand it ; for, such a 
conception, as Professor Sidgwick himself ob- 
serves in his Methods of Ethics, can never be w T ell 
defined, and, besides, it expresses, in my opinion, 
the effect of moral action, and not its end or rule. 
From all this it is easy to see, I believe, that 
from the theoretical point of view, which I as- 
sumed, only two principles could appear to me 
originally distinct and irreducible, viz.: the prin- 
ciple of absolute obligation, and the opposite 
principle of relative or conditional obligation — 
the principle of happiness, of the useful, of 
interest, whether general or individual. The 
dualism of these principles, hence of the schools 
which represent them, does not appear in this 
work as a postulate w T hich I accept without 
control, or as if it was received by the authority 
of sentiment or opinion outside of science. For 
me it is rather the consequence of what I try 
to demonstrate throughout this discussion, in 
which the opposition between the principle 



xvi Preface. 

of the absolute obligation and the principle of 
utility and happiness implies almost two contra- 
dictions, without the possibility of a middle 
term, so that the distinction between egotistic 
Hedonism and nniversalistic Hedonism should 
have appeared in it only as a subdivision of the 
second of those two principles. It certainly is 
a most important subdivision, but it is neither 
substantial nor original, inasmuch as I endeavor 
to show that, owing to the impossibility of well 
defining universal utility, and setting it down 
as a certain and obligatory rule of moral con- 
duct, the only criterion by which the individual 
is naturally led to value the good of others can 
not be drawn from anything but his sentiment 
and idea of his own good and happiness. Thus 
I am of the opinion that the ultimate scientfic 
and practical consequences of the most refined 
Utilitarianism coincide with the consequences 
of a properly understood egotism. 1 The fact, 

1 The reader is referred to a fine and strong argument 
"by M. L. Carrau against universalistic Hedonism, in the 
second of two articles devoted to a criticism of Prof. 
Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics in the Revue Philosop7dque y 
March and April, 1878. 



Preface. xvii 

then, that I have made the opposition, caused 
by the unquestionable progress of Utilitarian 
ethics since Bentham, a subordinate but not 
original distinction between egotistic Hedonism 
and universalistic Hedonism may be an object 
for discussion, but it seems to me that it should 
not be considered so much a positive error of 
fact as a confusion of unquestionable historical 
data. For the rest, how near those two princi- 
ples are to each other, and how one is implied 
in the more or less immediate consequences of 
the other, is shown by the fact — as Professor 
Sidgwick himself notes in the first chapter of 
the fourth book of his Methods of Ethics — that 
although Mr. John S. Mill proposes to make 
a distinction between them, he does not succeed 
himself in avoiding the risk of confounding 
them. 1 

I do not deny that it may be questioned 

1 Apropos of this, Prof. Sidgwick himself, in allud- 
ing to my polemic against the Utilitarianism of Mr. 
Mill, writes : " Nor is his (Barzellotti's) assumption 
that il bene, deW indimduo is mossa inevitdbile delV utilismo 
unwarrantable as regards Mill, though it leaves Comte 
out of sight." 



xviii Preface. 

whether I have sufficiently distinguished his- 
torically the two opposed schools — the Ego- 
tistical and the Utilitarian— and clearly shown 
their ever-increasing process of differentiation 
since Bentham. That I have well understood, 
at least, the necessity of distinguishing them 
will clearly appear to those who may atten- 
tively peruse the last four chapters of Part II 
of this work. At any rate, I willingly acknowl- 
edge my gratitude to this eminent critic for 
having noted in the historical apercus of my 
book some mistakes in detail which I have 
hastened to ratify. I must also thank Professor 
Sidgwick for the kind terms in which he re- 
ferred to the substance of my work, notwith- 
standing that he could not but partly ap- 
prove of it. I may be excused, I presume, if I 
quote his words: "Our author's reading in 
English psychology has been considerable, and 
the general views and criticisms which he gives 
us are close and definite, and always instruct- 
ive, even where they involve misapprehensions. 
Indeed, he seems to grasp more clearly and 
completely than most English antagonists the 



Preface. xix 

peculiar position of the Associationist psychol- 
ogy ; and he describes the distinctions and 
mutual relations of the different writers with 
much subtlety and delicacy of apprehension. 
And for the not unfrequent errors in detail, 
which I have to notice in this work, there 
are two kinds of excuse : Firstly, the dispo- 
sition, at once excellence and defect of Eng- 
lish philosophers, to sacrifice systematic cohe- 
rence to fidelity of reflective observation, makes 
the historical study of them peculiarly compli- 
cated and perplexing ; and, secondly, such a 
historical study is at present in the most rudi- 
mentary and imperfect condition among our- 
selves." 

To another criticism of his I think I can 
also reply. He says that when I affirm that 
no moral investigation, properly so called, can 
be based on the doctrines of Cornte, it clearly 
appears that my judgment rests "entirely on 
a priori arguments. And these arguments 
have much force; only they really tell against 
Comte's methodical consistency. A strictly 
4 objective ' study of mankind as a collection 



xx Preface. 

of organisms placed in certain temporal and 
spatial relations to each other, mutually de- 
pendent for their preservation, but occasion- 
ally acting on each other distinctively, affords 
no basis for any systematic direction of con- 
duct. But Comte's objective psychology does 
not exclude notions whose content belongs en- 
tirely to introspective observation ; it only in- 
sists on employing them meritized, just as the 
unrefective mind furnishes them. And so 
his sociology deals throughout with facts not 
expressible in terms of matter and motion, facts 
that have indeed an objective aspect, but a 
very obscure one, and whose significance is en- 
tirely subjective : as, e. g., the law of the three 
stages of belief. Hence Comte's exclusion of 
empirical psychology does not prevent him 
from having a characteristic and coherent view 
of ethics ; it only gives his utilitarianism an 
unrefective, unanalytical stamp." 

Now, it seems to me that the cogent reason- 
ing of Prof. Sidgwick does not go so far as 
to disprove that, in denying the possibility 
and value of introspective observation, Comte 



Preface. xxi 

blocked the only way by which he might have 
been led to make of Morality, as he understood 
it, a true science that would regulate human 
conduct. What confirms me in this opinion is 
that the author of the Methods of Ethics agrees 
with me in recognizing the profound contra- 
diction between the methodical, presupposed 
principles of the whole philosophical system of 
Comte and the conclusions to which he came 
with respect to disinterested morality, especially 
in his last works. If there is not reflection in 
the Comtean speculations, which is as much as 
to say, in this case, the scientific reflection of the 
mental process by which he reaches certain re- 
sults, it is enough, it seems to me, to make such 
results non-scientific. If in the demonstration, 
which he claims to give, of the moral and social 
necessity which give us motives of disinterested 
and mutual love, the vivre pour autrui, there 
are elements and data which have for him no 
rational value, and to which reflection gives 
no validity, because they proceed from a kind 
of experience which it does not recognize, it 
is enough to vitiate throughout and in its form 



xxii Preface, 

the whole demonstration ; in such a way, as 
Galileo said in his Saggiatore, that one contin- 
gent proposition mixed with others that are 
necessary is enough to make them all con- 
tiDgent. Incoherence and contradiction per- 
vade the spirit of Positive morality when, 
from the fact, objectively observed, that human 
individuals act upon each other through their 
social relations, in virtue of certain impulses, 
Comte passes to the conclusion that they must 
consequently act so and so in virtue of one 
moral necessity. It is, nevertheless, the same 
contradiction in which the Utilitarians, or the 
followers of inductive morality, fall ; a con- 
tradiction which, in the case of Comte, is 
made even more serious through the uncon- 
scious, hence illegitimate, use which he makes of 
psychological observation. " Auguste Comte," 
says M. Terraz, in one of his notable studies 
on the Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century 
(Paris, 1877), " ne reconnait que des faits; il 
faudrait qu'il admit des principes absolus et 
rationels ; or, il n'admet, que des idees relatives 
et experimentales. II peut parler de ce qui est, 



Preface. 



xxiii 



non de ce qui doit etre ; du reel, non de Pideal ; 
chez lui la morale est entrainee dans la rneme 
chute que la metaphysique." 

While I agreed with the English philoso- 
phers that dogmatical presumptions should be 
excluded from the province of philosophy, 
1 could not, as I cannot now, agree with 
them as to the limits and results of the way 
in which they interpret the data of experience. 
The point of controversy was, therefore, on the 
methodical legitimacy of reducing, as they do, 
the elementary data of moral facts to one or 
more of the laws that are established by 
scientific observation. 1 

1 Apropos of my criticism on Mill's reduction, Prof es- 
sor Sidgwick says : "He (Barzellotti) notices Mill's con- 
fuson of rational and emotional elements in moral ac- 
tion, or, more particularly, of the dutiful and sympa- 
thetic impulses which have a phenomenal distinctness 
undeniable on any system. And he argues effectively 
against the contemptuous treatment of the question 
of the objectivity of moral rules as belonging to tran- 
scendental metaphysics, and practically indifferent; 
whereas it is a fact of inner experience that on the 
belief in such objectivity depends the force of moral 
impulse to obey them, in so far as strictly moral." 



xxiv Preface. 

I cannot, for want of space, add any more 
than that I have not made any substantial 
changes in the American edition because I 
still hold the same views, and also because 
I am not aware that the views which I then 
criticised have since undergone any substan- 
tial modifications. For the rest, I hope that 
my work will not seem altogether inopportune 
in America, where it is, no doubt, realized 
that the vital questions of philosophy must be 
discussed on broad grounds and with impar- 
tiality, that the ideal of free institutions and 
the conditions most favorable to true human 
happiness may be permanently realized. My 
sincere desire of contributing somewhat to the 
promotion of philosophical studies, even out- 
side of my own circle, is the chief motive 
which has prompted me to authorize this 
translation, the execution of which is due 
mainly to the interest kindly taken in my 
work by Miss Ida Lilian Olcott, to whom I 
feel very much indebted. 

Giacomo Barzellotti. 
Florence, May 10, 1878, 



ETHICS OF POSITIVISM. 



PART I. 

LIBERTY AND CONSCIENCE. 
I. 

In" times of great renovations it often hap- 
pens that the inevitable consequences of certain 
states of mind and principles appear unexpect- 
edly, although they *were before ignored or 
misapprehended. As the subterraneous fire, 
making its way in every direction through the 
mountain -side, surprises the villages, which, 
being farthest from the summit, have perhaps 
not seen the burning lava for centuries, so the 
potent work of opinions and principles which 



26 Ethics of Positivism. 

prepare civil changes manifests itself in very 
different ways in the various orders of v thought 
and life./ 7 

The speculative tendency of modern phil- 
osophical thought appears also in science, and 
the great problems of existence and under- 
standing, which were declared insoluble by the 
Scotch, and afterward derided by Skepticism, 
are revived under another form in the Posi- 
tive school, the doctrines of which present 
lately a very singular spectacle./ Ignored by 
most scientists before the age of Auguste 
Comte, these doctrines withstood the fervor of 
the French and German speculations which 
succeeded to Sensualism, and found in later 
times a more favorable condition for their prop- 
agation in the universal mental restlessness and 
weariness which so many systems resulting 
from criticism had brought about. Then, they 
who would not know of metaphysics, or, rather, 
of philosophy, and who sought, as it is now 
expressed, a sound knowledge of things with- 
out losing themselves in abstractions, assumed 
the name of Positivists. Retaining few and 



Liberty and Conscience. 27 

uncommon principles of formal logic, and taking 
the method of natural science as the standard- 
method by which any inquiry should be car- 
ried on, this new school of thinkers omitted 
from their range of investigation any subject 
in the treatment of which something more 
than scientific instruments was to be used. 
There were then, as there are now, many 
who call themselves Positivists on the simple 
ground that they regard experimental research 
as implying the use, more or less accurate, 
of instruments and of the senses, and accept 
science as nothing more than an accumula- 
tion of facts. Fortunately, men of such bent 
of mind do not exclusively constitute the Posi- 
tive school of the present. The method sug- 
gested in the first, and exaggerated in the 
second, of the two principal works of Auguste 
Comte, has ever been the guiding principle 
in the development of Positivism. The doc- 
trines of this school are now expounded by 
many able writers, generally with acumen arid 
minuteness of analysis, so that we see the 
speculations of their master gradually assume 



28 Ethics of Positivism. 

the character of an intrinsically scientific theory. 
Although the scientific spirit which pervades 
this school was one of its original characteris- 
tics, it is only of late that its effects have be- 
come manifest. In France, Littre and Taine 
have given more breadth to the doctrines of 
their teacher ; and in England, Mill, Bain, 
Spencer, Lewes and Buckle have added psy- 
chology to the new system of philosophy, a 
branch of science which Comte had excluded 
from it. They thus rescued it from the mate- 
rialism of physiologists, putting in a partially 
independent form logic, morality, and the phil- 
osophy of history. The title of Positivist con- 
stantly lost some of its vulgar and anti-scientific 
character, and gradually there grew around, 
and ultimately within, the school itself, an at- 
mosphere of speculation. The problems of the 
understanding, of perception, of God and of 
Good, which had been so zealously banished 
from the premises of the Positive method, had 
to be met finally as logical consequences of those 
very premises ; and in this way a certain men- 
tal condition of the times, alluded to before, 



Liberty and Conscience. 29 

became verified in Positivism. The eternal 
dialogue between conscience and being began 
anew in the mind of Hamlet. 

An occasion that would proceed from the 
Very force of events and opinions was ne- 
cessary, as usual, for this new philosophical 
tendency to come to light. / Auguste Comte's 
doctrine, as enunciated in his first work, was 
directed principally to the basis and to the 
laws of scientific method, and opposed espe- 
cially the dogmatism of previous systems, by 
advocating the method of experience, and the 
careful investigation of facts. Such doctrine 
seemed, therefore, to many, to imply a form- 
ula easily applicable to any scientific faith. 

The matter changed aspect when Positivism, 
self-confident and sure of the favor of the 
times, undertook to affirm all of its principles 
and deduce their consequences. At this point, 
the question, which so far had been one of 
method and within the limits of history, be- 
came suddenly a question of morality, politics 
and economy. Consistently with their prem- 
ises, those who professed the principle of 



30 Ethics of Positivism. 

experience repudiated the theory of free-will 
and the imputableness of actions ; they made 
the principle of utility the standard of mor- 
ality, in lieu of Law and Duty ; they changed 
the foundations of Right and Authority, and 
now promise to substitute other institutions 
for those that have hitherto governed our 
political and social relations, and would, be- 
sides, give us a new religion in place of Chris- 
tianity. 

In France, Germany, and Italy, the public 
press daily discuss these subjects, and numer- 
ous works on questions raised by the new 
philosophers are published ; but in England, 
and in America, the practical and social sense 
of the Anglo-Saxons has been more strongly 
aroused by the new doctrines, so that in those 
countries, where the Positivists may be more 
numerous than elsewhere, and are well sup- 
ported in their opinions by able literary and 
scientific reviews, there are many contradict- 
ors of the new views, and not one number 
of these periodicals appears without containing 
extensive discussions on the most important 



Liberty and Conscience. 31 

ethical and political questions from opposite 
points of view. English Positivism is there- 
fore the school in which the rational and 
scientific direction of the Positive mind is 
more clearly and vigorously defined. Ger- 
many, tired of affirming, is now waiting: but 
the publications of the history of the various 
schools, as well as the occasional appearance 
of some large work on philosophical topics, 
prove that the speculative work of the mind 
does not cease in that traditional land of 
metaphysics. 

On the decline of the speculative move- 
ment in Italy, where it had begun with Gal- 
luppi, in the first half of this century, and 
with the rise of Criticism and the Hegelian 
doctrines, an echo of Positivism propagated 
very rapidly under the influence which the 
study of foreign speculations had on the 
Italian mind. The unbroken tradition of the 
experimental method in the Italian schools, 
and the speculative moderation with which 
the new doctrines were enunciated, contributed 



32 Ethics of Positivism. 

also to that propagation. 1 The second work 
of Anguste Comte is certainly very little 
known in Italy ; the second part of his first, 
implying the principle most agreeable with 
the positive tendencies of the age, is very 
much more expounded and accepted as a guide 
by many. 

Positivism is known in Italy more in its 
general principles than it is in its essential 
development, and is professed by many more 
as a method of research than as a doctrine ; 
it is an opinion which has not as yet attained 
to such a degree of development as to con- 
stitute a school. A few writers, such as An- 
giulli and Tocco, have considered the Positive 
doctrines in their affinity with ancient and 
modern philosophical tradition ; but, with the 
exception of Gabelli, about whom we shall 
have occasion to speak in the second part, 
we are not aware that any one has examined 
the principles and the moral consequences of 
the doctrines of Positivism. It seems, there- 

1 The above referred to moderation is noticeable in 
the Saggio sul Positmsmo, by Prof. Yillari. 



Liberty and Conscience. 33 

lore, quite useful to imaertake an examination 
of the important part which Positivism has 
assumed in ethics in so far as it refers to the 
two conceptions of Liberty and Happiness. 
We shall thus endeavor to refer the conclu- 
sions of that school both to the principles of 
the method on which its doctrines proceed 
and to the general movement of modern phil- 
osophical thought. 

II. 

C- ' - 

ohn Stuart Mill justly remarks, in his 
book on Comte and Positivism, that the general 
tendency of the doctrines of the great French 
philosopher is due less to Comte himself than 
to the spirit of the times. The method of ex- 
perience, from the numerous results of which 
naturalists for more than two centuries con- 
tinued to draw inferences, had its application 
extended in the psychological investigations of 
Descartes and his school, and in later times in 
those of the Scotch and of Locke ; but it be- 
came definitively entitled to scientific validity 
in Kant's immortal work, The Critique of ' Jfure 




34 Ethics of Positivism. 

Reason. The Positive school accepted that 
method, giving the broadest meaning to the 
word experience, a meaning which seems to 
be the major term in the new doctrines, while 
it constitutes their most flattering and popular, 
but least scientific, feature. 

To the idea of experience was added an- 
other, no less dear to modern thinkers and 
familiar to the soul — the idea of Law. The 
Positivists properly adopted this idea as a sec- 
ond postulate of their method ; for, any re- 
search the result of which is to be accepted 
as a foundation in science must culminate in 
something' constant and immutable which the 
human mind fixes in the complicated varia- 
tions of facts, and conceives as a natural neces- 
sity inherent in the forces of the universe. But, 
the scope of the idea of Law became notably 
narrower in the application made by the new 
philosophers. While naturalists, whom they 
respected greatly, applied mathematics to the 
study of terrestrial and celestial phenomena, 
and reasoned ingeniously concerning causes and 
forces, the word Law sounded to the multi- 



Liberty and Conscience. 35 

tude as something alive and extremely active ; 
whereas, in the new doctrines, by Law was only 
meant a certain intrinsic necessity of succession 
observed in facts,-e a necessity which has now 
become the pivot of the theory of the will, 
and the doctrine in which it is more resolutely 
affirmed has assumed the name of Determinism. 
It may be well to briefly examine the origin 
of this idea. 

When with the eye of consciousness I ob- 
serve a world of facts in myself and observe 
myself in the universe, what appears most evi- 
dent is the continuity of those facts. Going 
back from the present moment, when the 
motion of my hand in writing, in obedience 
to my will, follows an order of thoughts, facts 
and studies, intellectual and organic condi- 
tions, and, gradually receding in the conscious- 
ness of my past life, I can review the uninter- 
rupted series of what constitutes my life, past 
and present, I can thus re-examine the whole 
of myself, and of the links of that series, I 
shall certainly not find one to which a part, 
an atom of power and causality, has not been 



36 Ethics of Positivism, 

transmitted from what has preceded. Noth- 
ing is more mysterious, and at the same time 
more evident in facts, than the origin of such 
close relations. As in the physical world, since 
Newton, it is proved that the quantity of 
force does not vary in the continuous trans- 
formations of matter, so in the spiritual world 
force is persistent. Influences of any nature 
have more or less permanent effects on inward 
life ; a sentiment, a thought, circumstances, 
even the slightest incident, all add to what we 
are, and modify and transform us. Thus, after 
allowing, in a certain measure, for originality 
of character, we may ascertain, more or less, 
the sum of the conditions which influence 
mental development. The constant relationship 
of psychological and physiological elements 
which we observe in individual life has its 
analogy in the social organism ; for, in pro- 
ceeding from the singular to the collective, w T e 
see that uniformity and similarity increase 
in proportion as the facts become general, 
just as the undulations of the landscape appear 
to be level to one looking far out on the 



Liberty and Conscience. 37 

horizon. Thus, all life, whether spiritual or 
material, consists of facts in the order of se- 
quence which the philosophers of history, from 
Macchiavelli and Montesquieu to Yico and 
Buckle, have investigated so as to reduce social 
phenomena to laws variously determined in 
time and space. 

It is clear, however, that while the histo- 
rian and the philosopher proceed on such 
mode of observation, their conclusions should 
not be accepted as intrinsically scientific gen- 
eralizations. The surveyor who, by means of 
the compass and level, measures the surface 
of a mountain or of a valley cannot speak of 
either as can the geologist who, studying their 
history, as it were, in the pages of their strata, 
traces their metamorphoses from the remotest 
age. Scientific knowledge of physical and psy- 
chological facts implies a clear and certain per- 
ception of the causal relations involved in the 
sequence of those facts, and from such cogni- 
tion alone can the law by which facts are pro- 
duced and transformed be deduced. But it is 
important to engage with care in the process 



38 Ethics of Positivism. 

of induction, as nothing is easier in science than 
to exceed its proper limits, and end with a mere 
hypothesis. And such is generally the case 
when, identifying ourselves with things distinct 
from us, we fancy in the inner efficacy of the 
will the same fatal necessity inherent in the phe- 
nomena of the sensible universe ; in which case, 
both the uniform continuity of extrinsic things 
and facts, and the equally uniform continuity 
of the facts of the mind, appear almost as one 
pre-established, inevitable and fatal series from 
which we cannot be separated. The phenom- 
ena of the will and of consciousness are then no 
longer perceived as involving essentially dif- 
ferent forces, but only as the necessary effects 
of numerous active principles implied in the 
environment of the individual. Thus the doc- 
trine of fate, originating in an erroneous gen- 
eralization of the principle of cause, tends to 
deny that principle in man ; but, against such 
a negation, there is heard an inward voice which 
distinguishes man from the fatal forces of the 
universe, declaring him at the same time re- 
sponsible for his acts. It is true that in case 



Liberty and Conscience. 39 

of fault many would persuade themselves of 
the contrary ; but the criminal knows how the 
logic of remorse confirms right and wrong, 
even if some modern theorists still imagine 
such a discrimination to be an eternal illusion 
of the human mind. 

6 IIL 

The Positivists thus took an intermediate 
view in the question of Liberty. They assumed 
a standpoint between those who, confounding 
the efficacy of the will with the uniform ope- 
rations of other forces, conceive the fatal laws 
governing those forces to underlie also volun- 
tary and conscious activity ; and those who, 
losing sight of the relations of psychological 
facts, do not recognize any law to which those 
facts may conform. The former doctrine leads 
to Destiny and Pantheism ; the latter to In- 
difference and Chance. The Positivists tended 
to this standpoint from the start. They de- 
nied fatalism, and, in observing the constant 
order of succession, according to which psycho- 
logical phenomena occur, they considered but 



4-0 Ethics of Positivism. 

one phase of the long series of antecedents 
and consequents. In that particular aspect 
they conceived the implication of such a law 
of necessity as is observed to determine the 
phenomena of external nature. The word 
necessity > however, acquired a new meaning 
in the new doctrine ; for, to know a law no 
longer meant in the Positive school the coo'- 
nition of the operations of a force, but simply 
a recognition of the regular succession of cer- 
tain phenomena. The law by which facts be- 
come sequential was not conceived as a prin- 
ciple of essential connection between the facts 
of a sequence, but only as the invariable coordi- 
nation of those facts in time and space. 

The principle of cause and the conception 
of force, such as Liebnitz adopted so success- 
fully in his Monadology, were rejected by 
Hume and by the Sensualists ; and the Pos- 
itivists, following them on that score, indulged 
in such investigations of human acts as im- 
plied simply the study of analogies between 
individual and social existence. Psychology 
was thus based, to a large extent, on a few 



Liberty and Conscience. 41 

abstract principles of method ; and, consider- 
ing the superficial character of psychological 
facts, the new philosophers went no farther 
than the observation of the constant and uni- 
form succession of those facts. In reality, their 
observations implied the quantitative laws of 
the facts which they undertook to explain; 
and it is hardly necessary to say here that 
such method, useful as it may be to attain to 
some truly important results in physical science, 
will ever be inadequate to explain one single 
fact of the mind. We will briefly refer to 
the grounds upon which Positive thinkers urge 
the application of their experimental method 
to the theory of the will which they claim to 
reconcile in part with the idea of personality 
and responsibility. 

y/ Alexander Bain treats the subject very com- 
prehensively in his work on Mental and Ethical 
Science.) Beginning with the primitive ele- 
ments of voluntary action, he proceeds to ana- 
lyze separately all its elements in their relations 
to the physical and psychological conditions 
of the development of voluntary power. He 



42 Ethics of Positivism. 

recognizes the uniformity of sequence in the 
mental world as it is admitted to prevail in 
the physical world, and either affirms or im- 
plies that " the same motive, in the same cir- 
cumstances, will be followed by the same ac- 
tion." 

" If it be true," he says, " that by the side 
of all mental phenomena there runs a line of 
physical causation, the interruption of the men- 
tal sequences would imply irregularity in the 
physical. The two worlds must stand or fall 
together." He admits that " the specialty of 
voluntary action, as compared with the powers 
of the inanimate world, is that the antecedent 
and the consequent are conscious mental states"; 
but this circumstance, important as it is, does 
not, in his opinion, change the nature of the 
relations uniting those states. Liberty, that 
is, initiative liberty, and spontaneity, or absence 
of compulsion, are, he contends, synonymous 
terms; and although he affirms that his theory 
does not reduce mental sequences to pure ma- 
terial laws, the method pursued by him is 
such as to cause him to explain all mental states 



Liberty and Conscience. 43 

by a theory implying a combination and a 
conflict of forces. 

In referring to motives or ends, he says: 
" From the nature or definition of Will, pure 
and proper, the Motive or Ends of action are 
our Pleasures and Pains." Money, Health, 
Knowledge, etc., are in his definition interme- 
diate ends, and regards also virtue as one of 
them, in so far as virtue is the means to com- 
mon happiness and utility. The various phases 
of moral development, from the earliest ani- 
mal appetites, in which the will unfolds from 
instinct, to the free choice of the adult, are, 
for Bain, the results of an almost mechani- 
cal process. He explains Choice, Delibera- 
tion, Self- Determination, Moral Agency and 
Responsibility by the doctrine of the uniform 
sequence of motive and action. Of the ends 
in view, that which we pursue is presumed 
to have, directly or indirectly, the greatest 
attraction of any, and this is what determines 
choice. When we hesitate to pursue any of 
the ends in view, our suspense is prompted 



44 Ethics of Positivism. 

by the recollection of the pains that have 
resulted to us from hasty action ; while in a 
state of suspense we weigh the motives, of 
course, with reference to the happiness or 
unhappiness which the pursuit of one of the 
motives then before our mind may ultimately 
bring us. This state of the mind is what we 
mean by deliberation, in Bain's opinion. By 
self-determination he means the pursuit of 
motives without any interference from with- 
out. " Self" he says, " in the matter of ac- 
tion, is only the sum of the feelings, pleas- 
urable and painful, actual and ideal, that 
impel the conduct, together with the various 
activities impelled." We then see that this 
great philosopher substitutes the necessity of 
motives, as almost the effects of self-acting 
forces, for the immediate and determining 
efficacy of mental automony. According to 
his doctrine, human character, Self is the ef- 
fect of internal activities and external influ- 
ences mysteriously combined and transformed 
almost like undercurrents or molecules in the 



Liberty and Conscience. 45 

slow process of material transformations. 1 We 
can now understand how the meaning of 
morality has been substantially changed by 
the new school. In the conscience of man 
the terms good, evil, virtue and the like have 
a value derived, on one hand, from the con- 
ception of moral law ; and on the other, from 
the idea of free human agency. In denying 
this value, we do away with the idea of per- 
sonality, and we do not in consequence 
recognize personal responsibilit}^ before the 
law, even before the law as it is conceived 
by the Positivists ; nor can the sanction of 
their morality be conceived other than as a 
force quantitatively opposed to the motives 
of the agent. The penalty inflicted for any 
transgression, interpreted in accordance with 
the moral teachings of the school in question, 
appears almost like an obstacle raised by so- 
ciety and civil law against what is a neces- 
sary link in the sequence of the motives of 
man ; and penalty, thus interpreted, does not 

1 Mental and Moral Science ; a Compendium of Psy- 
chology and Ethics. By Alexander Bain. 



46 Ethics of Positivism. 

carry with it the force of moral sanction in 
the significance which mankind have hith- 
erto given to the phrase, moral sanction. If 
we accept the Positive explanation of morality, 
we cannot consistently try or punish one whose 
guilt is only the unavoidable consequence of 
a violent motive proving stronger than his 
fear of the law. To make him responsible 
for an action the motive of which is the in- 
evitable and universal necessity of nature 
would be as ridiculous and absurd as to claim 
redress from a river which overflows with 
disastrous effects to the surrounding country. 

We do not mean to say that all the Posi- 
tivists accept unhesitatingly the consequences 
of such moral doctrines. The English Posi- 
tivists in particular do not. The history of 
their nation is splendid proof of their truly 
practical and positive sense ; a sense which 
makes them tolerant of free discussion and 
inquiry, without assenting to the results of 
crude and imperfect investigations of the highly 
involved question of right and wrong. "While 
in Germany and in Prance, philosophers like 



Liberty and Conscience. 47 

Biichner, Littre, Yulpian and Thuys do not 
hesitate to subject the facts of the mind to 
physiological laws, in England the positive 
sense of the people is such as to prevent them 
from jumping at conclusions in the discussion 
of a question upon which philosophical schools 
are still divided. The cautious treatment by 
the English of a question which has for cen- 
turies perplexed the mind and conscience of 
man is due in part to their characteristic civil 
sentiment. In that country, more than else- 
where, the individual is identified with the in- 
stitutions, loves them as his own, defends their 
cause in religion, science and morals. It is 
not surprising, therefore, that the English 
should proceed more slowly than some other 
nations in the demolition of the old moral 
principles on which possibly depends the pres- 
ent and future welfare their national ex- 
istence. 

IY. 

This moderation is more noticeable in John 
S. Mill than in any other English philoso- 
pher. He accepted the principles of Posi- 



48 Ethics of Positivism. 

tivism, making some reservations, however, 
which suggest the peculiar, and, in some re- 
spects, original, direction of his mind ; a di- 
rection to which may also be attributed the 
influence which he has exercised on some phi- 
losophers of Great Britain. 

In giving full assent to the experimental 
method, Mill did not fail to do- away with 
the presuppositions which Comte had derived 
from the Sensualists and the Phrenologists. 
He did not exclude from the range of his 
method inner experience, the results of log- 
ical inquiry, or any problem the solution of 
which cannot be reached by any other method 
than the method of natural science. Mill thus 
took an intermediate position between the ex- 
tremists of his school; and, while he pursued 
the careful method initiated by the Scotch, 
and avoided the conclusions of the forced logic 
of any particular system, he gave a powerful 
impulse to psychological inquiry ; so that he 
could say witli reason that his island had 
regained the scepter of psychology. His 



Liberty and Conscience. 49 

Logic clearly shows that no one is more 
of a Positivist than he, in so far as the term 
applies to one who disapproves of the results 
of mere metaphysical speculation. His theory 
of judgment and reasoning, and his conclu- 
sions as to what are the highest principles, 
lead in fact to pure Nominalism ; and in what 
he has written on method and induction he 
repudiates, as is usual for those of the 
Positive school, the idea of efficient causes. 
He is, however, much more moderate in dis- 
cussing the question of free-will. This we see 
from his implied recognition of the idea of 
imputation and certain autonomy of charac- 
ter, notwithstanding his belief in the neces- 
sity and uniformity of psychological facts. 9 
Mill's opinion of the nature of voluntary ac- 
tions, and of their dependence on the law of 
universal causation, is indicated in the follow- 
ing quotation from his System of Logic : 
" To my apprehension, a volition is not an 
efficient, but simply a physical, cause. Our 
will causes our bodily actions in the same 
sense, and in no other, in which cold causes 



50 Ethics of Positivism. 

ice, or a spark causes an explosion of gun- 
powder. The volition, a state of our mind, 
is the antecedent ; the motion of our limbs in 
conformity to the volition is the consequent. 
This sequence I conceive to be not a subject 
of direct consciousness in the sense intended 
by the theory. The antecedent, indeed, and 
consequent, are subjects of consciousness. But 
the connection between them is a subject of 
experience." 

Proceeding on this principle, Mill excludes 
from the mental world a state of conscious- 
ness implying the apprehension of the internal 
cause of our actions, which he considers as 
an order of sequence, but not as essentially 
connected antecedents and consequents. Such 
view of mental phenomena is identical to a 
view of the phenomena of nature in which 
force is concealed. Sir William Hamilton, 
who could not, by a rational method, avoid 
the opposite doctrines of Fate and Chance, 
accepted the immediate and mediate testimony 
of consciousness in favor of the doctrine of 
free-will. But, in an elaborate examination of 



Liberty and Conscience. 51 

his philosophy, Mill contends that the feeling 
by which man fully determines his choice 
between opposed and conflicting motives can 
be referred to past experience, and is there- 
fore insufficient to prove free-will. 
6 This skilful application of the purely ex- 
perimental method causes us to advert to a 
theory prominent in the works of most Posi- 
tive writers. They either affirm or imply that, 
knowing the character and disposition of a 
person, and the motives before his mind, his 
conduct can be foreseen with the same pre- 
cision that we foresee natural phenomena. 
Such reasoning is hypothetical in itself, and 
is evidently based on the presupposition that 
if self-observation, like the observation of the 
facts of the outer world, implies simply the 
experience of the voluntary act in so far as 
it is an accomplished fact instead of implying 
the origination of the voluntary act in the 
causal efficacy of mind, it follows that we can 
predict phenomena on one condition alone — a 
condition which we would find in the perfect 
analogy, which is yet to be verified, between 



52 Ethics of Positivism. 

the progressive succession of the facts of the 
mind and the regular recurrence of the facts of 
external nature. But, while the effects of the 
invariable laws of nature can be, and are, to a 
certain extent, foreseen by a computation of the 
quantity and intensity of force, we do not be- 
lieve that a similar calculation can be made in 
our endeavors to establish the laws of mind. 
Notwithstanding Bain's doctrine, it is observed 
that the same circumstances, the same ends 
in moral life, do not always produce the same 
actions. Moreover, the presupposition that the 
relation between certain motives and individ- 
ual character is known before the course of 
conduct prompted by those motives, combined 
with some points of character, is manifested 
is one of the very presuppositions which, ac- 
cording to the Positivists themselves, we should 
not accept while the above referred to analogy is 
not demonstrated on strictly scientific grounds. 
What observation easily presupposes is the 
causal mental efficacy by which we create and 
translate motives into actions. 

That Mill must reject any predictions based 



Liberty and Conscience. 53 

on the law of necessity in the phenomena of 
mind is clear, when we consider that the 
conception of a necessary sequence, such as he 
holds to be that of human phenomena, has 
a small basis at best, and that his conclusions 
have but the relative value derived from past 
experience, which, however, teaches that it is 
possible that actions should occur quite con- 
trary to those contemplated or expected. This 
point is particularly noticeable in John S. Mill, 
and upon it he dwells, taking occasion for 
absolutely denying any intervention of fate in 
determining mental phenomena, regretting at 
the same time that this fatalistic idea should 
have been so often confounded with philosoph- 
ical Determinism. At this point he openly 
departs from the conclusions of the extrem- 
ists of his school. Bain admits the possibility 
in man of changing his character by force of 
some motive before his mind, whereas Mill 
seldom refers to motives, and simply concedes 
that a person has the power of changing his 
character if he will. Such a doctrine he 
regards as clearly distinct from the views of 



54: Ethics of Positivism. 

the fatalist who, in holding human actions to 
be dependent either on a combination of ex- 
ternal conditions, or on essential, and conse- 
quently inevitable, propensities of human nature, 
does not really regard man as being respon- 
sible for his conduct. 

This ingenious theory does not, however, 
bear the test of logic. Either Mill considers 
that power by which man can modify or 
control himself as the effect of a causal con- 
catenation, in which case, as Mansel justly re- 
marks, fatalism is implied, or he introduces 
in his reasoning a postulate which experience, 
as he understands it, does not furnish. Such .. 
a postulate would be a first antecedent, not 
resulting, by necessary succession, from more 
remote antecedents in the mental sequence, 
and would be equivalent to a primal link in 
the causal series which begins in our con- 
sciousness of free-will. 

The points we have considered in the doc- 
trine of Mill imply a speculative tendency 
which may be regarded as an indirect proof 
of that philosopher's strong moral sense, the 



Liberty and Conscience. 55 

power of which may account for another con- 
tradiction which we are about to point out in 
his discussion of the subject.'! fl e accepts as 
a positive postulate a certain distinction be- 
tween good and evil, and considering evil as 
that which is naturally avoided, hence as an ob- 
ject of pain, he endeavors to explain on the 
basis of that distinction the reason why man- 
kind should regard some ends as useful and just 
in themselves. He recognizes, therefore, the 
sense of personal responsibility as a fact result- 
ing from the recognition, by the individual and 
society, that justice should be administered in 
contemplation of a purpose which by ultimate 
analysis may prove to be either self-defense 
or sympathy. Where Bain recognizes a pe- 
titio 2^incipii, Mill is evidently inconsistent ; 
for, the real difference between good and evil, 
right and wrong, which Mill postulates, and 
refers to a sense of individual responsibility, 
is related by final analysis to our consciousness 
of the freedom of the will and of moral 



56 



Ethics of Positivism. 



Y. 

The reader may fail to see any real phil- 
osophical originality in the Positive doctrines 
concerning the Will as they have, so far, been 
exposed in this work. In fact, the first prin- 
ciples of a philosophy which does not recog- 
nize efficient causes — a denial which character- 
izes throughout the doctrines in question — are 
found in Hume's Treatise of Human Reason, 
and also in the theories of the French and 
English Sensualists ; while the habit which Mill 
and Bain have of using the term experience 
in a rather confused sense, giving it sometimes 
a strictly scientific meaning, is traceable as 
far back as Bacon, Locke, and the oldest in- 
ductive and empirical schools. Bnt$ in order 
to explain fully the theoretical development that 
has taken place in the Positive school of late 
years, it is requisite to set forth how those 
constituting that school, assuming in common 
with Comte a general question of method as 
their starting-point, have been gradually led 
to the study of essentially psychological sub- 



Liberty and Conscience. 57 

jects. The tendency which Positivists in gen- 
eral, and particularly the English, have com- 
monly shown in their ways of treating ques- 
tions of mental philosophy is such as to make 
them appear to be engaged in an intermediate 
path between the extremes of absolutely deny- 
ing the old doctrines and of affirming too much 
from their own point of view ; so that their only 
claim to speculative novelty seems to be the 
peculiar attitude which they have assumed in 
the controversy on the great question of mind. 
Their theories represent, in an historical sense, 
the shelter in which thinkers of the present 
age seek mental rest from doubts with which 
they have long been distressed. A skeptical 
expedient which, although professedly recurred 
to as positive , must be repellant to the truly 
scientific mind, even if it may not be abso- 
lutely useless to those who, realizing the need 
of philosophical certainty, conveniently create 
a system of their own. 

The tendency to which we have just re- 
ferred is evident when we consider the dis- 
tinction that the Positivists have sought to make 



58 Ethics of Positivism. 

between Determinism and the other idea of fate 
as it existed in the systems of old. Whether 
the older philosophers, basing their speculations 
on the subject, held in the phenomena of object- 
ive life an active force identical with the con- 
scious efficiency of the will, or conceived vol- 
untary actions to be in submission to the law 
of necessity which regulates bodily forces, it 
is known that in either case they required a 
metaphysical postulate for the solution of psy- 
chological questions, and such a postulate im- 
plied generally the causal efficiency of mind. 
Neither the doctrine of fate, such as is logi- 
cally deduced from the hypothesis of a uni- 
versal soul as held by the Stoics, nor the doc- 
trine of the strict materialists of the last cen- 
tury, would therefore be in accord with the 
canons of a school which accepted only care- 
fully observed facts, adopted no other method 
but that of experience, and used as a logical 
mode of observation the process of gradual 
induction by which the laws governing facts 
are established. Such facts, however, as we 
have seen, when carefully and properly inves- 



Liberty and Conscience. 59 

tigated, are simply constant and uniform ap- 
pearances of matter. The so-called Positive 
age, the third in the celebrated order of suc- 
cession conceived by Comte, finds its origin 
in the substitution of a purely scientific knowl- 
edge of phenomena and of their laws, for the 
abstract metaphysical entities which, in a pre- 
ceding stage of mental development, are, ac- 
cording to him, conceived in place of those 
laws. It is well to note here that among 
those entities which the great French thinker 
repudiates there is certainly the notion of 
causality. 

But, it has long been an open question 01 
philosophy whether in the contemplation of the 
phases of natural phenomena man perceives sim- 
ply a reflection of his conception, or whether 
in his consciousness alone lies the immediate 
basis of that conception. It seems, therefore, 
that, in repudiating the ideas of causality and 
efficiency, the Positivists have from the first 
laid aside considerations which may be essen- 
tial to the proper and direct investigation of 
the facts of the mind. On the other hand, 



60 Ethics of Positivism. 

to suppose that they have seems hasty when 
we consider a certain tendency which they 
show in their method of dealing with the ques- 
tion. In the works of Mill and Bain, reference 
is continually made to phenomena which they 
attribute to consciousness, and some of these 
phenomena, as we have already noted, imply 
elements of voluntary action. Moreover, Mill 
very ably contradicts Comte, who denies psy- 
chological examination proper, and in his 
Logic he goes so far as to constitute the 
phenomena of consciousness into an order dis- 
tinct from the phenomena of organism and mat- 
ter. It seems hardly possible that after such 
affirmations these philosophers should so pursue 
their arguments as to fall into such manifest 
self-contradictions. But, their very inconsisten- 
cies, and the importance which they constantly 
attach to psychology, are gratifying indications 
that even the new school find in psychological 
analysis a source of information different from 
the light which scientific experiment alone 
can ever throw on the involved question of 
mind. 



Liberty and Conscience. 61 

It is, nevertheless, undeniable that the true 
method of psychological inquiry is not yet clearly 
defined in the Positive mind. Experience, ob- 
servation, induction, and like terms, have now so 
broad a meaning that they may equally be 
used to denote schools of different and even 
opposite scientific tendencies. It seems as if, 
now-a-days, a school need only assume the 
name of Positive, Experimental or Inductive, 
in order to find adherents even among those 
whose opinions may be essentially different 
from those of the school to which such a title 
is given. Unfortunately, very few consider 
anything more than the mere implication of 
a title ; and, unlike the supporters of true 
science, many fail to investigate whereto the 
course of Positive thought leads, and fail like- 
wise to ascertain what is the highest crite- 
rion by which Positivists claim acceptance 
for their views. IVe may add that careless 
definition and the indifference, if not contempt, 
with which questions of mind are generally 
treated, have had the effect of confounding, in. 
the minds of many, the school of Positive psy- 



62 Ethics of Positivism. 

chologists with the school of ethnologists, an- 
thropologists and historians, the results of whose 
researches are generally of the same nature as 
those of the Positivists, without, however, follow- 
ing substantially the principles or the method 
of the Positive school. In fact, these schools 
consider man under different aspects. While 
they both make intellectual and moral life the 
object of their studies, the former, pursuing 
their investigations without departing from the 
method of the naturalists, observe the facts of 
inward life simply in the external manifesta- 
tions of the soul, in various organisms and 
races, in the customs and in the history of na- 
tions ; the latter, on the contrary, investigate 
the same facts in so far as they are accessible 
to self-observation. Both the naturalists and 
the ethnographers, like Quatrefages, regard the 
facts of the inner world as essentially different 
from those of external nature. They observe 
those facts as they are presented in statistics, 
travels, experiments and chronicles. The Pos- 
itive psychologist considers the facts of the 
mental world as facts of consciousness, and 



Liberty and Conscience. 63 

observes them both subjectively and object- 
ively. 1 

What is important to note for our purpose 
is that the Positive observation of the facts of 
the mind is not based on the state of con- 
sciousness involving the apprehension of the 
psychological fact as an act of the mind in the 
very instant it is produced. The succession 
of experiences which they conceive in place 
of true consciousness seems to imply simply 
a recognition of the act as an effect, and not 
the apprehension of the force that causes it. 
While they miss the inner force which impels 
the agent into activity, they perceive the act 
only as a modification of previous mental im- 
pressions. The true psychologist detects in 
consciousness an inherent capacity of appre- 
hending what actually passes in self; whereas, 
by his experimental mode of observation, the 
Positivist sees in consciousness simply a record, 
as it were, of the feelings which have success- 

1 The above somewhat inaccurate distinction be- 
tween the two schools is given by Vacherot, in his 
late work, Les Sciences et les Consciences, Paris, 1870. 



64 Ethics of Positivism. 

ively been impressed on the mind. To the ob- 
servation of both, mind manifests itself through 
the phenomena of the inner world ; but one 
considers the active forces which underlie men- 
tal functions, while the other studies the ef- 
fects of mental forces alone through the faith- 
ful but cold language of the past. The har- 
mony of mental powers is the common object 
of their observations, but the former seizes a 
spontaneous force in the mental act almost like 
the physiologist who, watching the dying ani- 
mal, seizes the flash of vital force which causes 
its last pulsation. The latter, on the contrary, 
sees the acts through memory, no longer as 
the expressions of active forces, but only as 
objects of analysis, almost like cold and motion- 
less remains under the knife of the anatomist. 

It is easy to see how such a method is 
partly due to the particular conception which 
the Positivists formed of consciousness as they 
assumed the premises of Comte and Hume. It 
is known that, with a strong faith in phrenol- 
ogy, Comte disavowed all belief in subjective 
psychology, declaring that the mind cannot re- 



Liberty and Conscience. 65 

act on its own spontaneous operations ; an as- 
sertion not only absurd in itself as being con- 
trary to the most undeniable fact that we are 
conscious of our past actions, but also as in- 
volving the scientifically erroneous presupposi- 
tion that w T e have no immediate knowledge of 
our actual mental states. The English Posi- 
tivists appear to have become possessed with 
this presupposition, but they have not accepted 
so extreme a conclusion as Comte reached as 
to self-knowledge. But the influence of the 
negative philosophies of Hume and Kant was 
still felt when the modified doctrines of the 
new philosophers were first enunciated. The 
old ideas of efficient causes could not, there- 
fore, regain their former objective value founded 
on consciousness, in an age of comparative phil- 
osophical indifference ; nor could the English 
thinkers soon become insensible to the splendid 
tradition of the method of psychological inves- 
tigation which the Scotch had formerly taught 
to Europe and to the world. Thus failing to 
make the immediate cause of mental phenom- 
ena the object of their inquiries, philosophers 



66 Ethics of Positivism. 

like Bain and Mill have given to psychology 
a character which they have themselves ex- 
plained as a natural history, of the mind. 
They observe the facts of the mind arranged 
in an uninterrupted series, almost like images 
reflected in a mirror, and do not think of the 
power by virtue of which those facts become 
sequential ; nor do they apprehend the essen- 
tial connection between the mental sequence 
and a spontaneous force of the mind. Psy- 
chologists of this category see mental facts 
gathered in memory like objects drifting calmly 
and continuously on the surface of a river, but 
do not point to the source of activity from which 
they proceed. This insufficiency of their method 
is again perceived when we see them define 
mind as the unknown recipient of mental phe- 
nomena. 

V It is now noticeable how they reduce 
psychological law to a law of association, to 
a coordination of ideas in time and space, 
and as they reduce to a single fact of that 
law the principles of causality and of force, 



Liberty and Conscience. 67 

so do they refer to the same law the external 
perception and the instincts of animals, as 
Charles Darwin has lately expounded. Judg- 
ment, reason, induction, science, are all re- 
garded, under the new system, as associations 
of facts and of their concomitants ; combina- 
tions of elements of experience which the think- 
ers in question express by an abstract term in 
an identical proposition — universal ideas and 
supreme principles. They also explain the 
idea of the infinite by the law of association, 
declaring that such idea is formed by adding 
new points to many others which we have pre^ 
viously thought out in time and spacefill 
this way, an insignificant and obscure fact of 
the mind is transformed, in the doctrines un- 
der consideration, into all the facts of the 
mind; very much in the same way that Con- 
dillac transformed sensation into the most splen- 
did conception, into judgment or reasoning, 
and into the most solemn of moral phenom- 
ena. 



63 



Ethics of Positivism. 



It is easy to gather from the foregoing re- 
marks the conclusions of the new psycholo- 
gists in regard to the will. The theory of 
both Mill and Bain, which we have just con- 
sidered, may be considered as resulting from 
the particular stand-point which they have 
taken in psychology. They occupy an inter- 
mediate position between those who acknowl- 
edge the immediate testimony of consciousness 
without considering the elements that enter 
into self-knowledge, and those who see in 
self-knowledge simply a fact of external expe- 
rience the law of which we derive from a study 
of historical facts, or from the cognition of 
the general laws of the phenomena of the outer 
world. We now propose to briefly refer to the 
results of the new mode in which Positive phi- 
losophers follow the inquiry of choice and free- 
will. 

They do not deny, as we have seen, that 
we are conscious of successive and connected 
states of mind ; at least they do not in instances 



Liberty and Conscience. 69 

where action is not regarded as the result of 
spontaneity ; in which cases, as the poet would 
express it, Amove e a noi di fuori offer to, 
we are actuated by the force of instinct, so 
that action implies no element of determina- 
tion, but is only an automatic operation of the 
mind ; something like the unconscious bend- 
ing of a plant growing where but a dim ray 
of light penetrates. The various phases of 
our existence, from the most important events 
to the mere incidental facts, from the serious 
consequences of old habits to the first impulses 
of free-will, from which habits spring as from 
a germ, all exist in our consciousness as a se- 
quence, as a uniform and invariable order of 
antecedents and consequents, of causes and 
effects. The character which Manzoni describes 
in his Promessi Sposi as the Unknown, in re- 
viewing the course of his life, sees himself 
carried along from bad to worse deeds, and 
feels so oppressed under the burden of a cer- 
tain logical necessity of his acts that he is about 
to free himself from it through death. He 
tries to understand how, free from a sense of 



70 Ethics of Positivism 

hatred or fear, he has been prompted to cause 
so much suffering, so much misery, to an un- 
known and unfortunate woman, only to satisfy 
the evil inclinations of a friend. He wonders 
why he feels the impulse that has led him to 
so much iniquity to be an instantaneous motion 
of the mind, caused by habitual feelings, a nec- 
essary consequence of a thousand antecedent 
facts, rather than the effect of deliberation. 
This tremendous necessity implied in his course 
of conduct does not, however, awake in him a 
sense of self-justification. So far from dimin- 
ishing his sense of responsibility, it seems to 
increase it as he realizes the terrible conse- 
quences of one single initiating motion of 
free-will. 

It is true that, considered in a certain aspect, 
the consciousness of individual life implies the 
same sequential necessity which we observe in 
the course of history. If it were possible, how- 
ever, to apprehend the beginning and the most 
obscure circumstances of what sometimes ap- 
pears to be a social catastrophe, we would dis- 
cover its real and primal cause in some one of 



Liberty and Conscience. 71 

the elements which concur to produce it. But 
we cannot see more than an order of succession, 
a long and invariable series of facts ; and al- 
though we observe how those facts coalesce, so 
as to constitute a complete succession, we do not 
ascertain, but simply conjecture, which of those 
facts has the strongest and most direct influence 
on the others. Thus viewed through the mist 
of long years, an event which was brought about 
by the combination of innumerable desires and 
passions appears to us as the result of a me- 
chanical combination of congenial or antago- 
nistic forces, almost like a phenomenon of the 
inanimate world ; and measuring, to a certain 
degree, the quantity and nature of those forces, 
we deduce an historical law. But, if we could 
identify ourselves with that event, and for an 
instant be conscious of the many psychological 
conditions which concurred to its occurence, we 
would be conscious of a multiplicity of neces- 
sary causes, while we would not fail to realize 
the movement of the will which initiated the 
train of feelings and passions which resulted 
ultimately in the social disturbances, and we 



72 Ethics of Positivism. 

would thus find that on the will of the few 
often depend the destinies of a nation. 

What the historian and the chronicler does 
not see, that which the observation of the suc- 
cession of internal facts does not reveal, we 
know by the actual and instantaneous conscious- 
ness of our will. In the various phases of 
a mental state, from the beginning of a motive 
which prompts a resolution to the end of the 
act resulting therefrom, there are intervals in 
which the soul feels alternately the power of 
passion and of reason, of necessity and of voli- 
tion ; it is like the painful alternation of desire 
and indifference, a powerless submission and 
a powerful control; a conscious change of 
thought from duty to pleasure, from good to 
evil : a struggle between the fear of one's own 
resolution and a reckless confidence in it. In 
all this there is, no doubt, necessity, there is 
law ; but the point in question is not whether 
this mental strife is the effect of law or not. 
The point at issue is whether the individual 
contributes to the establishment of the law of 
necessity which it is contended determines men- 



Liberty and Conscience. 73 

tal facts. We ask whether the individual puts 
himself under the influence of that law through 
his own mental power. The question really is 
whether what the fatalist and determinist call, 
vaguely, motives of action are such for the in- 
dividual in so far as he makes and wishes 
them to be. The point upon which we take 
issue with the Positivists is not the law of vol- 
untary causality and its prevalence or alterna- 
tions in the various aspects of mental existence. 
The consciousness of motive is not absolute, it 
does not exist previously to the action result- 
ing from the motive \ if such was not the case, 
the influence of the motive in the various men- 
tal states which follow it would always be the 
same, whereas we know that the influence of 
the motive becomes weaker as the acts and 
their consequences increase and the will rela- 
tively loses its force. 

The original source of every human phe- 
nomenon, therefore, is to be found in the im- 
mediate intervention of the mind, in free de- 
termination. Such is the first link of the 
causal chain. But mental intervention is a 



74: Ethics of Positivism. 

transient force which expends itself as soon 
as its effect is produced, as soon as the act 
is initiated ; and it is only in so far as we are 
actually conscious of that force that it may 
have any scientific value in the theory of ex- 
* perience. The observation through the memory 
of the succession of mental facts reveals the 
various stages of mental life, but it does not 
detect the nessus which causes those stages to 
become sequential. In fact, it is only after 
we observe a mental state as an accomplished 
fact, that the voluntary antecedents which gave 
birth to it appear invariably connected with 
the consequents; and not until the sequence 
is formed do the links, which have been freely 
chosen, acquire a character of inseparability. 

From what has been said we can more 
easily comprehend the real meaning of the pas- 
sage we have before quoted from the writings 
of J. S. Mill. Consistently with the method 
of observing successively the facts of the mind, 
he denies that the causal bond of the various 
elements of the voluntary act can be considered 
as an object of consciousness. Such nessus, we 



Liberty and Conscience. 75 

apprehend, in fact, in the immediate conscious- 
ness of the antecedent and its consequent, of 
the motive and of the will; which conscious- 
ness is at the same time the consciousness of the 
act. Nor do we need bring forth in opposition 
to the Positive theory, what may have already 
occurred to the reader's mind, namely: the 
first intervention of the will in the phenomena 
of mind may be the effect of either especial 
corporeal conditions or of unknown external 
causes. Even if the arguments of Hobbes 
and of. the fatalists can logically be applied in 
the doctrines of Buchner, of Littre and in those 
of the physiologists, as we have seen, they can- 
not effectually be applied in the doctrines of 
the determinists who, repudiating all that the 
metaphysicians postulate in the necessity of 
the will, reduce the question which we consider 
to a question of interior observation, pure and 
proper. 

From what precedes we can easily draw 
the conclusion that the movement of Positive 
thought in the question of liberty implies, by 
final analysis, a tacit negation of conscience- 



76 Ethics of Positivism. 

If feeling and immediate self-knowledge, which 
constitute the principal data of psychology, 
have any value as scientific testimony, it is 
just because they enable us to observe directly 
in itself a force which fully controls us ; a 
control which we realize in the dependence 
of action on the causal efficacy of mind. A 
denial of the principle of causality and of force 
must, therefore, carry with it the refutation 
of the value of the testimony of the close re- 
lation between mind and act implied in the 
feeling and knowledge that we have of what 
actually passes in ourselves, and consciousness 
thus becomes a mirage. It is then considered 
as a chronicle representing the superficial as- 
pect of the coordination in time of mental facts, 
and not the inherent force of which they are the 
results. That the Positive thinkers restrict the 
validity of internal testimony within so narrow 
limits as to destroy all faith in it is plainly 
shown by the fact that they always prefer 
purely scientific subjects and methods. It is, 
besides, expressed by one who is less circum- 
spect than most of the thinkers of that category. 



Liberty and Conscience. 77 

We refer to Buckle, who, in his Introduction 
to the History of Civilization in England. 
denies free-will, as he proceeds on a disbelief 
in the veracity of consciousness. 

In Italy, Aristide Gabelli follows Positivism, 
both in principles and method, and he, too, fails 
to find any value in the testimony of conscious- 
ness ; but there remains in his theories some 
vestiges, as it were, of the ideas of liberty and 
responsibility — a point in his philosophy which 
has justly been held up to him as an incon- 
sistency, but one which we cannot but regard 
as one more indication of the spirit of modera- 
tion which we have already recognized in the 
Italian doctrine. 

TIL 

In conclusion of the first part we add that 
we have so far endeavored to point out, as 
briefly as possible, how the scientific tendency 
of the Positivists, as expressed by the philoso- 
phers who have taken for a general postulate 
of their method the negations of Hume, leads 
to an erroneous conception of interior observa- 



78 Ethics of Positivism. 

tion, and destroys faith in the testimony of 
consciousness and in the true nature of moral 
life. Taking a broader view of Positive Ethics, 
we propose to show in the following pages how 
the principles and conclusions of the new school 
explain a close connection between the course 
of modern Positive thought and a tendency to 
close criticism which marked philosophy pre- 
vious to Kant. We shall also see that so far 
from laying aside metaphysical questions, mod- 
ern Positivists tend to prepare, if not hasten, 
a new solution of the great problems of exist- 
ence and understanding. It has been well to 
briefly review, in the meantime, Determinism, so 
as to recognize the new speculative aspect which 
the theory of voluntary necessity has acquired 
under the Positive method. Notwithstanding 
its many contradictions, this new aspect of the 
Positive theory of the will betrays plainly a 
design to harmonize, to a certain extent, the 
current vivid conception of natural laws with 
the general testimony of consciousness. For 
the rest, the new doctrine, as a contemporary 
writer notes, properly understood, is not abso- 



Liberty and Conscience. 79 

lutely irreconcilable with the doctrine of free- 
will ; and in their intermediate position between 
the fatalists, who base their theories on physi- 
ology, and those whose views betray moral 
indifference, Positive psychologists may finally 
investigate the limits of human liberty ; a 
broad subject which, although it has long occu- 
pied great minds, is yet to be considered with 
greater reach of thought and investigated with 
more vigor of analysis. 



FART IX. 



THE THEOEY OF THE MORAL END. 
I. 

The reader may have noticed that we have 
thus far treated the subject analytically, with 
a view to fully reveal the elements involved 
in moral nature. We have pointed out how 
the first element of man's moral nature is to 
be found in his free moral agency. When we 
deliberate, we are conscious of various mental 
conditions coexisting in the act of deliberation ; 
but the essential element in the deliberative 
process we feel to be the spontaneity of in- 
stincts, feelings, and affections, combined with 
both thought and reason, which, directing the 
will, are what makes us regard the act as the 



82 Ethics of Positivism. 

result of determination and reflection. The 
action which does not originate in this superior 
and more serene form of mind must always 
be regarded as nothing more than an instinct- 
ive action. It is, in fact, the effect of a nec- 
essary impulse ; it is one of the many ways in 
which the spontaneous force of mind is ex- 
pressed when under the influence of internal 
and external conditions. In this case the law 
to which the manifestations of that force con- 
form is the same law which, in the world of sen- 
sation, causes the so-called reflex phenom,eno?i. 
Even in the light of the most refined experi- 
ments of modern science, naturalists cannot, in 
our opinion, reduce all psychological facts to 
one order of reflex actions ; for they cannot 
explain the essential difference between the 
acts of simple instinctive and voluntary spon- 
taneity, and such acts as we feel to be the results 
of an inherent deliberating mental power which 
characterizes the individual as a free agent. 
This is one of the considerations which caused 
Hegel to think so fruitful in philosophical results 
the idea of a self-knowing being. The con- 



The Theory of the Moral End. 83 

scioiisness that we are responsible for our actions 
is one of the essential elements in our concep- 
tion of the nature of mental operations ; and 
while it is not conclusively proved that such 
consciousness is illusory, no one can deny that 
it is the elementary distinction between the 
inferior conception of the mind whose acts are 
almost mechanical in nature, and the higher 
conception of mind involving conscious- will as 
the agency by which the act is originally in- 
itiated. 

But the idea of free will, such as we have 
expressed, will be incomplete unless we con- 
sider it in connection with the no less import- 
ant idea of moral end ; an idea absolutely de- 
void of scientific value if not brought within the 
range of psychological investigation. In the 
motions of animal life, in the motions of sense, 
and in the phenomena the causes of which are 
partly unknown and partly explained by the 
current theory of molecular attraction and re- 
pulsion, in the motions of appetite and instinct, 
the tendency to the end inherent in the very 
nature of the act manifests the efficacy of what 



84: Ethics of Positivism. 

the impulse receives and transmits much less 
than the universal and harmonious operation 
of the great combination of forces underlying 
those phenomena. It is, as it were, the law 
of the operation, rather than the law of the 
agent, which, being called into activity by an 
unconscious necessity alone, appears in this case 
as something of the character of a medium, and 
not a primal and true cause. There is in the 
adult a personal character, a personality which, 
involving mental activity superadded to the 
necessary force of sense, enables him to appro- 
priate and modify the impressions which the 
mind receives from without. We freely adapt 
means to the end which we appreciate through 
our moral perception, and it is in this free adapt- 
ation of means to an end that we realize our 
standard of merit or demerit. For instance, we 
know that, while we submit to a law, it is in 
our power to exert ourselves with a view to en- 
force that law or to defeat it. The idea of 
human action such as we form from the analy- 
sis of free-will implies, then, the recognition 
of the moral end as the limitation of free human 



The Theory of the Moral End. 85 

agency, and that limitation as the law of free- 
will also. Such law is the morality or immor- 
ality of the act the consequences of which will 
follow as soon as the end is fixed. Thus we 
refer free-will to its law. AVe shall now pass 
to a study of the Positive doctrine of happi- 
ness and utility. 

II. 

By his moral faculty man was from the first 
inclined to a search of the supreme good much 
more spontaneously than he was inclined to 
an investigation of human liberty ; and it is in 
the history of his investigations to that end that 
we find strongly marked the eternal contrast 
between the soul and the body, between the 
ideas of a present and a future life ; the eternal 
contrast between reason and sense, between 
the absolute and the relative. The oldest re- 
ligions and mythologies of Eastern and West- 
ern nations which implied the first indistinct 
outlines of the idea of moral good in positive 
precepts, or obscured that idea under the form 
of the fable, opened the course of development 



86 Ethics of Positivism. 

from the rude and indefinite form of that idea 
in primitive human society to the sublime, and 
often terrible, form which it assumed in the 
Vedas, in the Decalogue, in Homer, and, later, 
in the Tragedies. The scarce documents which 
throw a faint ray of light on the state of phil- 
osophy previous to Socrates do not clearly 
enough suggest the noteworthy influence which 
the great problem of the moral end must have 
had on the Oriental and Ionic doctrines, and 
particularly on the Pythagorean and Eleatic 
doctrines. This influence is, however, noticea- 
ble in the direction of the school of Socrates, 
in which the opposition between the specula- 
tive method and a tendency to experiment, 
between the objective idea of good and subject- 
ive Eudemonism — an opposition which at all 
times extended from psychology and metaphy- 
sics to ethics— became personified in the two 
great representatives of Greek thought: Plato 
and Aristotle. The wide difference, however, 
which these masters made between absolute 
morality and the morality whose end is hap- 
piness, is quite clear to those familiar with their 



The Theory of the Moral End. 87 

works. In Protagoras, good is connected with 
pleasure, and it approaches the idea of law and 
order in Gorgias. In the Pliilibiis and the 
Republic the conception of good is beyond 
the transitory, the sensible, and implies the 
rational, the divine, that which is end in itself. 
It is certain that % the moral direction of those 
dialogues is quite different from the direction 
of the Nicomachean ethics; but not even at 
this point does investigation assume a directly 
opposite tendency ; for, while the question is 
on the practical end of life, which is to be found 
in happiness, the idea of happiness which is 
connected with the notion of the perfect, the 
transcendental, the relative good, first proposed 
in the Stagirites, is here changed into the ab- 
solute good which is end in itself. The two 
great aspects of the question are much more 
distinctly marked out by the contrast of the 
Cyrenaic, Cynical and Epicurean morality with 
the morality of the Stoics ; a contrast which, 
after being examined by the Romans, receives 
new light in the Jurisconsults, in the De Fini- 
busj in the De Legibus and in Marcus Aurelius ; 



88 Ethics of Positivism. 

it loses force in Plutarch and Seneca, it be- 
comes of little importance in the metaphysi- 
cal doctrines of Alexandria, and on the first 
rising of the philosophy of the Fathers ; it 
survives the opposition of Pagan traditions to 
Christian reform in the Middle Ages, and finally 
it reappears as a true doctrine in the Italian 
schools of the second Renaissance and in Gras- 
sendi and Descartes. 

If we turn our attention to philosophical 
studies in modern Europe we see that the ques- 
tion of the moral end is agitated by the Eng- 
lish schools with a spirit of broad and earnest 
criticism. The same diversity of opinion which 
we have noted on the question of free-will 
appears again under the form of a truly great 
problem of philosophy in the opposed schools 
of intuition and utility. Lecky, a most emi- 
nent contemporary historian, thus defines these 
schools in his History of European Morals : 
" The former school contends that by the 
constitution of our nature the notion of right 
carries with it a feeling of obligation ; that is 
to say, a course of conduct is our duty in itself, 



The Theory of the Moral End. 89 

and, apart from all consequences, an intelligi- 
ble and sufficient reason for practicing it ; and 
that we derive the first principles of our duties 
from intuition. The moralist of the opposite 
school denies that we have any such natural 
perception. He maintains that we have by 
nature no knowledge of merit and demerit, of 
the comparative excellence of our feelings and 
actions, and that we derive these notions solely 
from an observation of the course of life that 
is conducive to human happiness." 

These and other principles which we will 
hereafter explain form the substance of the two 
schools. What is particularly notable is that 
they represent, under their respective titles, 
an immense variety of opinions and speculative 
directions. Such a variety of opinions, be- 
sides showing the profound need of moral in- 
quiry to which we have attributed the recent 
development of the Positive doctrines, shows 
that the reform to be made in the organism 
and method* of knowledge is not as yet mature. 

Political movements characterize our times 
as disturbances of a similar nature marked the 



90 Ethics of Positivism. 

last fifty years of the eighteenth century ; but ? 
while in those times the human mind had only 
to free itself from the debris of a fast demol- 
ishing past, at present it must struggle with 
the sympathies and apathies of old institutions, 
the excesses of innovators, the innumerable 
monstrous ideas which, persistently enunciated, 
hinder true progress; so that we find it much 
more difficult to politically reorganize and ful- 
fil our solemn obligations to the future. As 
a river which, tearing away the embankments, 
overflows in the form of a delta, and is crossed 
by opposed and dangerous tides as it ap- 
proaches the mouth, so the events of 1789 and 
1793, which revolutionized society, have appar- 
ently subsided ; but under the superficial calm 
there are opposed and dangerous influences 
growing more powerful with the course of 
events. This apparent calm is the usual effect 
of the cooling of human passions, and implies 
the weakness of character which moral science 
sooner or later perceives. "While the theory of 
the end, which reflects with speculative light 
the moral sense of a people, is thus discussed 



The Theory of the Moral End. 91 

from so many different standpoints, we do 
not wonder why it lias not yet been presented 
under a truly scientific form. 

In this conflict of doctrines the origin and 
the cause of the prevalence of some of them 
are clearly discernible. The theory of abso- 
lute obligation, which sets out with the inves- 
tigation of the human act, duly recognizes 
disinterested affections and the utilitarian tend- 
encies, but it derives the idea of good from 
something higher, and fixes it in the infinite. 
This theory has always been opposed by the 
schools which deny the two fundamental prin- 
ciples upon which it proceeds — the intellectual 
part manifest in moral phenomena and the 
relation of good and of law with the absolute. 
The school of materialists, which lost much of 
its prestige in the early part of the present 
century, when Scotch ideas prevailed again in 
France and German criticism was at the height 
of its influence, belong to the former order 
of doctrines, which Cicero called plebeian, and 
is the school the theory of which Buchner and 
Moleschott ventilate in our time. The moral 



92 Ethics of Positivism. 

theory of that school — if it has one — can only 
be a theory based on instinct and appetite. 
It originated with Aristippus and Epicurus, and 
found its latest exponents in Helvetius and Hol- 
bach. Such must be the theory of whoever 
holds doctrines which do not recognize the 
reality of the mind. Doctrines of this kind 
are generally entertained by men of science 
who by principles and by a certain mental 
training in positive studies are averse to any 
mode of inquiry which may lead from prem- 
ises of inner experience to conclusions of spec- 
ulative philosophy. 1 Such class includes also 
a number of Positive philosophers less mindful 
of speculative results and intent upon extend- 
ing the range of psychological observation be- 
yond the limits within which it was restricted 
by Auguste Comte. One of these is Littre. 
Although he cannot be said to be an absolute 

'We note with pleasure that this anti-speculative 
tendency is not common to all Materialists; one of 
them, Mr. Herzen, in the second edition of his 
Physiological Analysis of Free-will, seems to side with 
us on broad grounds of philosophy. 



The Theory of the Moral End. 93 

follower of Buchner, some points of his studies 
seem to nearly coincide with the speculations 
of the German thicker. 

The other school, or combination of schools, 
which repudiates the other element on which 
is based the theory of absolute obligation is 
Independent Morality. Its title greatly ex- 
plains its meaning — a doctrine which is equally 
removed from materialism, metaphysics, and 
theology. It recognizes in man rational dis- 
interested affections and the binding force ot 
a notion of moral good, and accepts as an in- 
disputable datum the liberty and responsibility 
implied in the human act ; but, at the same 
time, it professes that on these foundations alone 
a whole system of morality can be established 
without recurring to higher principles or to the 
reality of an absolute object implying moral 
obligation. These are the general ideas ot 
some writers in France and Belgium. For 
these timid and not quite faithful interpreters 
of internal experience, thought without its ob- 
ject is enough to give absolute value to scientific 
inference. Human wishes, limiting each other, 



94 Ethics of Positivism 

form an order of mutual duties and rights ; a 
dynamics of spontaneous, intellectual and sen- 
sible forces. It is clear that all this is not 
sufficient ground for absolute obligation ; and 
even if those writers have the merit, as Count 
Mamiani has said, of finding a simple, neat 
and sound morality, they do not seem to be 
under the guidance of the higher principles 
upon which alone the scientific character of 
a system depends. 

"We have thus far greatly elucidated one 
important point of the subject in question. We 
have determined which of the various contem- 
porary schools of morality is most intimately 
connected with Positivism with respect to the 
question of the end of our actions. We shall 
now lay aside our consideration of those who 
build the moral theory on physiological facts, 
and who constitute a class of teachers who have 
many disciples in France, in Germany and 
Italy. As we have noted, they do not admit 
an essential difference between the facts of 
sense, of appetite, and moral facts properly so- 
called; they therefore assume from the start 



The Theory of the Moral End. 95 

an attitude of opposition to true ethical in- 
vestigation. 

It is clear, however, that independent mor- 
ality — even if we consider the support that it 
receives from some Positivists — is not exactly 
the form of the principles and of the method 
of the moral doctrines which, as we have 
pointed out, were explained in England under 
certain favorable circumstances, and which ac- 
quired scientific organism in the traditional 
course of the experimental ethics as expounded 
by the Utilitarians. Independent morality re- 
gards the absolute as something distinct from 
and superior to consciousness ; but it also con- 
siders the ideas of good and of duty as two 
distinct principles. Jouffroy indicates that such 
theory has an origin, more or less immediate, 
in nationalism. 

But the various opinions implied in the 
morality of Positivism are conclusions follow- 
ing from the same premises. Positive mor- 
alists take a common starting-point in a ques- 
tion of method, and to such a question they sub- 
ordinate all the elements which are gradually in- 



96 Ethics of Positivism. 

eluded in their system through the ever broader 
range taken by the utilitarian theories. We 
shall soon explain how it happens that the 
title Positive is generally given to many dif- 
ferent schools provided that they agree in some 
general and rather vague tendency of method. 
Meantime we have deemed it useful to give 
a general definition of the difference between 
Independent Morality and the Inductive Mor- 
ality of the Positivists ; for the definition of 
that difference may help us to explain the 
foundations and define the limits of the lat- 
ter. 

In a publication which the opponents of 
the new doctrines in England have welcomed, 
Lecky expounds the various systems of mor- 
ality. With characteristic calm and force of 
thought and conviction, he comments on the 
progress of modern thought in questions of 
morality. He justly condemns the indefinite 
sense in which the term inductive is used 
by the Positivists in connection with their sys- 
tem of ethics ; nor does he fail to blame the 
theistic school, which also claims to verify in- 



The Theory of the Moral End. 97 

ductively the origin and nature of moral ideas. 
We observe in this the application of the great 
principle that truth must not be considered as 
a privilege, but as the common aim, of all char- 
acterized with activity of thought. According 
to this principle, the investigator will pursue 
the way which he sincerely believes to be one 
of true progress, without interfering with those 
who, pursuing the same path, may precede 
or follow him in the great march to the de- 
sired goal. 

The word inductive, which Positivists use 
rather arbitrarily in discussing ethical questions, 
and which is seldom used correctly in a sci- 
entific sense, is, however, sufficient to suggest 
that the Positive school is historically associ- 
ated with those who in the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries tended to apply the in- 
ductive method in the solution of ethical prob- 
lems. To this connection Lecky refers, and 
seems to give the new doctrines such validity 
as is generally derived from tradition and ages, 
and besides explains how the ethics- of modern 
English schools has found a basis in the phil- 



98 Ethics of Positivism. 

osophy of two previous centuries. In order 
to substantiate the foregoing statement, it is 
necessary to go back in the history of the de- 
velopment of moral ideas, and consider the 
important features which have foreshadowed 
the progress of speculative thought from an 
early epoch to the present time, in which we 
study these doctrines as they are enunciated 
by the eminent men that constitute the so-called 
Positive school. We propose to confine our- 
selves to a review of the English philosophers 
because they look upon this subject as one of 
universal importance; besides, in England, Pos- 
itivism has had an uninterrupted and glorious 
tradition of more than two hundred years. 

III. 

This tradition has not so far been well 
known in Italy, where the speculative move- 
ment which Europe saw in the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries caused philosophical spec- 
ulators to form into factions. The names of 
Bacon, Locke, Hume, and the Scotch school 



The Theory of the Moral End. 99 

became known in that country generally through 
^French expositions in which those names ap- 
peared associated, in various ways, with the 
difficulties attending the efforts at a solution 
of the problems of method and of the under- 
standing. The question of the origin and 
foundation of moral ideas, so earnestly dis- 
cussed by the English philosophers of those 
times, reached, therefore, the thinkers of the 
Latin nation only as a distant and interrupted 
echo of the transactions of a great school. 

The origin of this school, according to Eng- 
lish critics, is to be found with Hobbes, who, 
being a contemporary of Bacon, of Queen Eliz- 
abeth and of Philip II, and witnessing in his 
European travels the political events consequent 
on the authority vested in the reason of great 
states, formulated theories implying the funda- 
mental idea of all such doctrines, as, later, 
the school of subjective psychology developed 
and coordinated on the basis of the useful and 
the relative. 

In his doctrine of the sense and appetite, 
which inevitably leads him to the other doctrine 



100 Ethics of Positivism. 

of the passions and the will, he evidently con- 
fines all questions as to the motive of the moral 
act within the limits of the subject. In fact, 
if voluntary motions through the imagination 
have their beginning in sense, and sense is mo- 
tion communicated by external objects to the 
human organs, in the state of deliberation there 
are alternating desires and aversions, hopes and 
fears, regarding one and the same thing. One 
of two results follows. Either the thing is 
judged impossible, or it is done ; and this ac- 
cording as aversion or appetite finally triumphs. 
Now, the last aversion followed by omission, 
or the last appetite followed by action, is the 
act of willing; happiness he defines as a con- 
tinued success in the gratification of our de- 
sires. It is easily seen that, according to his 
theories, there is no fixed and immutable end 
to which human actions must be directed. The 
end of life is, like happiness, a continuous and 
progressive satisfaction of our appetites. His 
inquiry into voluntary actions as originating in 
sense proceeds both on physiology and politics. 
Moral relations are to him but civil relations 



The Theory of the Moral End. 101 

growing out of conflicting instincts and pas- 
sions ; and he rests the political part of his sys- 
tem on one constant, inflexible idea — Force. 
Such theories could certainly not favor a de- 
velopment of the conception of absolute ethics, 
and much less an immediate application of 
its theories to the practical pursuits of life. 
In fact, nearly all the latest doctrines of Posi- 
tivists, on the manifold question of ethics, 
whether bearing on education or civil laws, ap- 
pear to have some of the vigor that the demol- 
ishing logic of Hobbes retains to this day. 1 

Although the various directions which Eng- 
lish thought subsequently took in the field of 
moral philosophy are referable to the influence 
of Hobbes, we do not find, on close examina- 
tion, that his influence alone explains the pos- 
itive tendency which has ultimately prevailed 
in English psychology. Hobbes did not admit 
disinterested affections, bringing forth in justi- 
fication of this denial the same reasons which 
Helvetius and Bentham reproduced more than 

'See Alexander Bain's Moral Science, Part II, The 
Ethical Systems. 



102 Ethics of Positivism. 

a century later to sustain views more or less 
identical with those of the founder of material- 
ism. Yet, this negative character of his theory 
had not the effect of bringing, by preference, the 
opposite schools into such a course of inquiry 
as might imply a strictly psychological invest- 
igation of human actions. Descartes had al- 
ready represented, by his famous Cogito, ergo 
Sum, that thought exists independently of its 
objects ; but this he did with little or no effect 
in that age and in a country like England, 
where most of the philosophers belonged to 
the clergy, and theology and Platonism had 
still a strong hold on the universities. Growl- 
ing rather oppressed under the restrictions of 
the experimental method which Bacon had ad- 
vocated, philosopher^ would lay aside every 
now and then the study of nature and psy- 
chology in order to breathe more freely in the 
atmosphere of metaphysical speculation. The 
effect of this habit, having now become per- 
ceptible in the applications of the deductive 
method and in the geometrical nature of dem- 
onstration, characterized by itself the two great- 



The Theory of the Moral End. 103 

est systems of the seventeenth century : that 
is, the system of Malebranche and the ethics 
of Spinoza. The influence of this modification 
was soon felt in England, and the prevalence 
of the a priori method over introspective ob- 
servation became apparent in some of the 
doctrines enunciated then in that country; 
while the speculations of Cud worth and Clarke 
assumed a breadth which has not marked the 
views of the moral philosophers that England 
has since produced. The absolute necessity 
which true moralists propounded in their op- 
position to Sensualists and Naturalists like 
Hobbes, and the analysis of the intellectual 
and rational functions which determine human 
conduct, in place of the cold anatomical study 
of instincts and sensations, show that the first 
school of metaphysical moralists had in view 
a far higher scientific achievement, a higher 
position in science, which English moralists 
lost sight of as soon as they confined their 
studies to the moral sense. 

This subjective direction could not remain 
long unexpressed. Cudworth (1617-88) and 



104 Ethics of Positivism. 

Clarke (1675-1729), with a bent of mind 
more metaphysical than psychological, reduced 
the sum of moral questions to the immutability 
of intuitional and rational principles; and, 
considering such principles in themselves, they 
gave them an order and a hierarchy. But no 
sooner had philosophy become exclusively inter- 
ested in the study of internal and external 
experience, in conformity to the method of 
Bacon and Locke, than it entered a narrow 
sphere, and the psychological analysis of feel- 
ings, of tendencies, and of the acts of the sub- 
ject, inevitably became the sole possible object of 
ethical investigation. Under the new discipline, 
Richard Cumberland had investigated, before 
Locke, principally, the sentiments of benevo- 
lence and mutual love ; and, in his opposition 
to Hobbes, he had shown that in the satisfac- 
tion of those sentiments human happiness and 
the end of human life were to be found. It 
can, therefore, be said that, while his doctrine 
is greatly in accordance with Clarke's, it is 
the doctrine in which first appeared, in con- 
trast with the egotism of Hobbes, the true 



The Theory of the Moral End. 105 

conception of the collective and common util- 
ity which Bentham afterward expressed in his 
principle of the greatest happiness of the 
greatest number. 

But the supporters of subjective ethics who, 
excluding all metaphysical elements, rested 
their theories simply on the results of psycho- 
logical examination, could not constitute them- 
selves into a school, properly so called, and 
assume the habit and method of true science, 
except under the direct influence of the doc- 
trines of Locke (1632-1704). The students of 
English philosophy know, nevertheless, how 
uncertain and perplexed this great philosopher 
is in matters of moral philosophy, notwith- 
standing that he repeatedly asserts that ethics, 
" by a steady contemplation of the relations 
of its fundamental notions, might, and ought 
to, become as perfect a science as geometry" 
They know, likewise, that, although he finds 
an identity between the voluntary act and 
appetite, he propounds human freedom and 
responsibility, and that he recurs at once to 
divine authority, to civil law and to public 



106 Ethics of Positivism. 

opinion in order to find an explanation of 
the origin of moral obligation. In spite of 
his uncertainties, there prevails at the bottom 
of Locke's moral doctrine both Sensualism 
and Determinism ; and, besides, what must, at 
any rate, have contributed to make him influ- 
ential with the moralists that subsequently 
formed the empirical school, there were the 
proofs which such a doctrine brought forth 
against the simplicity and independence of 
moral ideas. In an analysis of the innate prac- 
tical principles, contained in the third chapter 
of his Essay on th e Understanding Locke ar- 
rives at the conclusion that those principles are 
not self-evident, owing to their complexity ; and 
as they are not universally accepted, it follows 
that they are not innate. His analysis cannot 
be said to be rigorous in every respect, but it 
implies one of the first evidences of a certain 
tendency, a science of morality, by the method 
of the dissection and reduction of psychological 
facts; a method which, in time, became common 
to nearly all the English schools. Since then 
those philosophical schools have followed a par- 



The Theory of the Moral End. 107 

ticular course. Their tendency lias become 
steadily clearer, until we see it assume definite 
form in the method of the psychological inves- 
tigation of the origin and nature of moral affec- 
tions and of the idea of obligation. 

This prevailing method of research is es- 
pecially applied to the investigation of the na- 
ture and value of disinterested sentiments; for 
a strong objection to the egotistic theories of 
Hobbes remains yet to be removed. The au- 
thor of the Leviathan, and also Locke, reduced 
the ideas of good and evil to the simple feel- 
ings of pleasure and pain ; but they did not, 
in this way, explain conclusively (as Cumber- 
land said) the actions in the performance of 
which we have in view the good of others; 
and much less did they explain the notion of 
duty, which, regardless of any external interest 
and sanction, is felt in the depth of human 
nature. This objection is, no doubt, rather 
old, as modern Positivists and Utilitarians are 
prone to tell us ; but it is an objection which 
they have not as yet removed by the efforts 
of nearly three centuries ; and we do not hesi- 



108 Ethics of Positivism. 

tate to say that the broader views which Eng- 
lish philosophers have expressed in the great 
controversy on moral principles since Camber- 
land and Locke are mainly due to the specu- 
lative evidence of that objection, and to its 
influence on the feelings and the affections. 

Some of the most glorious names of the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are asso- 
ciated with it. The first philosopher who, 
under the influence of Locke, turned ethics, as 
Erdmann remarks, into a natural history of 
moral acts, into a theory of virtue, was Lord 
Shaftesbury (1670-1713). He initiated the 
esthetics of moral feelings, and recognized hap- 
piness as the ultimate end of human life; but 
what he meant by happiness he could find 
only in the harmony of individual feelings ; in 
the harmony of self-interest, self-love, with the 
social instinct and the love of others. 

In opposition to this doctrine, based on feel- 
ing and instinct, Joseph Butler (1692-1752) 
brought forth, in his Sermons, a doctrine in 
which consciousness was made the foundation 
of the conception of virtue and of obligation ; 



The Theory of the Moral End. 109 

showing that the essence of moral life consists 
in our aspirations to the former and in our 
obedience to the latter, regardless of what the 
consequences of our conduct may be to others, 
and apart from any consideration of instinct, 
sanction or utility, individual or general. On 
the other hand, Hutcheson (1694-1747) elab- 
orated a system in which he further developed 
the doctrine of the moral sense, holding that 
it is the moral faculty that leads us to mutual 
love, and that self-love is legitimate and good 
in proportion as the actions which it prompts 
result in good to others. This was not a new 
principle of his system ; it was originally ex- 
pressed by Lord Shaftesbury; but Hutche- 
son, the founder of the Scotch school, deter- 
mined and demonstrated that principle by an 
original method. Assuming full knowledge of 
man, with the view to fix the aim of moral 
philosophy, he made a very minute analysis 
of the faculties and of the sentiments. This 
analysis, which is comprised in the three books 
of his posthumous work, A System of Moral 
jPhilosojihy, very distinctly anticipates the 



110 Ethics of Positivism. 

broad views of the Scotch school. It is true 
that, as Hutcheson, Smith and Reid felt the 
influence of the experimental method, their 
investigations became limited to the feelings 
and the affections — to the subject. But we 
maintain that the strong opposition to the 
Encyclopedists and to the doctrines of the Sen- 
sationalists and the Skeptics in the last cen- 
tury, and the vigorous way in which the 
truths implied in the doctrine of consciousness 
are now-a-days upheld against the injurious 
theories of modern Criticism and Empiricism, 
are facts in the development of philosophical 
thought to be chiefly referred to the influence 
of the Scotch school. 

IY. 

It would be well to briefly consider the 

causes of the opposition and defense to which 
we have just referred ; for their consequences 
directly bear on the material and form of 
modern Positive ethics. If we weigh the 
value of proofs and the literary and scientific 
standing of the controversialists, the question 



The Theory of the Moral End. Ill 

of the origin and nature of disinterested affec- 
tions does not appear to have been decided 
when it was so earnestly agitated in the seven- 
teenth and eighteenth centuries. Illustrious 
names, great minds, worthy institutions were 
divided on the question, and the general 
mind, perplexed between traditional authority 
and the incentive of the new doctrines, could 
not easily reach a definite conclusion on the 
subject in question. The schools of Hobbes 
and Locke, both of Baconian descent, repre- 
sented for the English mind the national glory 
of the method of science by the application 
of which, it was believed, an end had been 
put to the troubles of the schoolmen and met- 
aphysicians ; but the religious element did not 
fail to rise in opposition to the bold negations 
of the new thinkers in a country where the 
spirit of the Reformation, opposed to Rome 
and to her dogmas, had for long centuries 
been identified with a deep moral sentiment. 
Thus supported by eminent men and by an 
enlightened and impartial public opinion, each 



112 Ethics of Positivism. 

system was represented by an equal number 
of schools. 

But a close study of the speculative aspect 
of the question, in which opposite directions 
of thought appeared evenly balanced, shows 
that one of them ultimately prevailed. The 
reasons of such prevalence we have already 
assigned. The eternal protest of conscience 
against the egotistical theories of Hobbes and 
Locke, and the absolute, irreducible nature of 
the principles and ideas of responsibility and 
obligation, were proofs which acquired greater 
scientific influence as the supporters of abso- 
lute morality laid aside the problem of the 
mystery of origin, and investigated the real 
nature of moral facts through the immediate 
observation of consciousness. Herein consists 
the real merit of the Scotch ; and it is grati- 
fying that another great philosopher, whose 
views generally coincide with those of the op- 
posite school, should accord with them at least 
on this particular point of the question. Lecky 
and Bain, whose authority cannot be doubted, 
recognize David Hume as one of the expo- 



The Theory of the Moral End. 113 

nents of disinterested affections. The former, 
who does not accept the identity which some 
modern critics claim to find between the views 
of Bentham and those of Hume, quotes a pas- 
sage in which the latter explains moral appro- 
bation and disapprobation as originating in a 
particular faculty of sentiment. 1 Although in 
the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of 
Morals the theory of end is referred to the 
conception of utility, there is in it an improve- 
ment of method, as the author introduces into 
the question the difference which Butler had 
previously established between the elements 
of Reason and Sentiment which concur in our 
moral judgment. This distinction being ex- 
amined simultaneously by Price in his Review 
of the Principal Moral Questions, caused him 

1 History of European Morals, by Lecky, page 4. In 
a note the author quotes several passages from the first 
paragraph of the Enquiry Concerning Morals. This is 
what we allude to above. Mr. Lecky adds that the 
two writers to whom Hume was most indebted were 
Hutchcson and Butler. See Alexander Bain's Mental 
and Moral Science ; see, also, Lecky's note on page 21 of 
the above quoted work. 



114 Ethics of Positivism. 

to refer to the understanding the first and de- 
termining agency of moral actions ; a doctrine 
which is very similar to Clarke's. Thus the 
theory of absolute morality, without deviating 
from a psychological course, gained ground not- 
withstanding so many contradictors. It is truly 
beautiful to meditate on history so as to perceive 
through the veil which open contradictions are 
apt to cast on this question the course of de- 
velopment through which great minds are 
harmoniously led to the truth; and to feel, 
likewise, the impulses which the opposed schools 
gave to each other with an effect which, al- 
though disavowed at the time by the contend- 
ing parties, reappears now as a new acquisition 
in the scientific world, as the result of the con- 
flicting forces underlying the dynamics of sys- 
tems. 

Y. 

This effect became apparent with the devel- 
opment of the theory of the association of 
ideas. It is a theory which was not unknown 
to the ancients. We gather it from some pas- 



The Theory of the Moral End. 115 

sages of Aristotle, and the Epicureans fore- 
shadowed it in reasoning on the origin and 
nature of affections, and especially on the nature 
of friendship. It was first defined by Locke, 
and Hume put it in proper speculative form ; 
while Hutcheson, in his treatise on the Pas- 
sions, applied it to the doctrine of choice, which 
he termed secondary. An almost unknown 
priest, named Gay, accepting, as irrefutable, the 
arguments of Hutcheson in support of the exist- 
ence of a moral sense in the adult, attempted 
to reconcile this fact with the doctrine of 
Locke, whose adherent he was. This he did 
in a brief dissertation, from which Hartley — 
as he himself owns — -formed his first idea of 
the theory which, in 1747, he applied to the 
whole subject of mind. This application is of 
especial importance in our criticism, as it is 
the sign of the influence which absolute moral- 
ity had on the mind of the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries ; and it shows, also, that 
the opposite school was, at the same time, 
becoming more conscientious of its own method. 
Even if the arguments of Hobbes and Locke 



116 Ethics of Positivism. 

seemed, for a time, to disprove disinterested 
affections, and the ideas of virtue and of duty 
as innate elements, they could not long hold 
out against a serious criticism, and deny those 
elements, such as they really are, and as they 
are known to us. It was, therefore, necessary 
to recognize them as genuine internal facts ; 
and, since the inductive school wanted to show 
by analysis that those ideas were not primal 
and original facts of the mind, but that they 
could be reduced to other facts less complex, 
it was necessary, in such a case, to point out 
the psychological process by which those ideas 
could have been formed. Such a necessity of 
method, which Utilitarian moralists recognized 
and appreciated, shows that the psychology of 
the negative schools had so far developed as 
to give, afterward, to the ethics of the Posi- 
tivists the scientific organism which marks it 
at present. After this we can briefly outline 
the doctrine of Hartley, which has been ac- 
cepted by Bain and Mill, and by nearly all the 
Positive moralists. 

In opposing the principles of subjective eth- 



The Theory of the Moral End. 117 

icSj according to which the individual desires 
everything by and for himself, those who be- 
lieved in disinterested sentiments, and in the 
idea of a moral good which is end in itself, 
asked how the phenomena of desire could 
take place and elude consciousness. Many 
examples were adduced in answer to the ques- 
tion. Money, it was said, has nothing in itself 
which is desirable, but, since it is the means 
of procuring whatever we desire, its idea be- 
comes so associated with that of pleasure that 
afterward we love it only for itself, and so 
much so that sometimes we prefer it to what- 
ever we may acquire with it. Examples were 
afterward multiplied. Power, glory, praise — 
things which we seek for the use and satis- 
faction that we derive from the possession 
of them — we grow to love for themselves 
alone, to such an extent that we sometimes 
sacrifice life itself for them, love being 
thus transferred to the actions by which they 
are acquired. It is the same in the case of 
moral sentiments and virtuous acts. Benefi- 
cence, justice, charity, are practiced only for 



118 Ethics of Positivism. 

the real pleasure and use which we realize 
from them ; but as the idea of them becomes 
associated in our minds with that of the es- 
teem of our kind, of mutual services, and with 
the hope of reward, they become, through the 
influence of education, of habit, and of exam- 
ple, absolute objects of our desires and acts. 
It is ever the same phenomenon transformed 
in various aspects. That which we at first seek 
and desire as the means to an end we after- 
ward desire as end in itself, with the differ- 
ence, however — says Mill — that, while the de- 
sire of power and glory may often make man 
dangerous to society, virtue makes him benefi- 
cial, and for this reason the love of virtue 
must be encouraged and promoted by the 
Utilitarian school. Hartley and his followers 
recognize, therefore, moral consciousness as an 
important subject of interior observation, and 
in this they differ from older schools ; but, by 
a process which Lecky happily calls a strange 
^philosophical alchemy, the theoiw of such con- 
sciousness, with its desires of an absolute and 
transcendental good, originates, according to 



The Theory of the Moral End. 119 

their method, in the strictest and most system- 
atic egotism. 

A proof of this we find in the history of 
the doctrines which we criticise. With the 
general improvement of psychological doctrines 
in the school of inductive morality, the tradi- 
tion of the principle of self-interest implied 
therein since Hobbes was never lost. In the 
early part of last century, Mandeville, desum- 
ing all moral ideas from institutions, prepared 
the sophisms of Helvetius. But the narrowness 
of his method, by which he could not solve 
one single question, and the need of finding 
in nature a sounder basis for the Utilitarian 
theories, were such as to make the new school 
less and less disposed to face rigorous con- 
sequences. It is true that, even if we take 
into account the objections made to it by 
Brown, the doctrine of Paley may be regarded 
as a notable improvement of the general theory. 
Paley, like his adherents in the Inductive school, 
attaches absolute importance to the principle 
of utility, deriving all the influence of moral 
command from sanction alone. But, in rec- 



120 Ethics of Positivism. 

ognizing that it can also originate in the idea 
of a future life and of a supreme Legislator, 
Paley 's doctrine points to the broad method 
which caused many schools to be attracted by 
the Utilitarian theories. Of the writers that 
prepared the alliance, as it were, of the Posi- 
tive method with Experimental ethics, Paley is 
nowadays the most quoted. It is true that his 
authority cannot be greater than Bentham's, 
but he and Hume can be considered as the 
precursors of Bentham. Not only was Paley 
the leader of his school: he was, also, its strong- 
est and broadest ordainer. Herein he did lit- 
tle that was new, but he corrected much, made 
sound and systematized what had been done 
before. A thorough Englishman, and an old 
resident amid those great institutions which 
are, personally, the sense of the nation, he 
expressed by the experimental method the es- 
sence of the doctrine most conformable to the 
calculating and industrial spirit of the age. 
In morality, his conception of good and 
evil desumed from pleasure and pain, and the 
arguments against the belief in disinterested 



The Theory of the Moral End. 121 

acts, bring him back suddenly to Hobbes and 
Helvetius; but, to judge of the moral value of 
an action according to the good or evil which 
is caused by it is, to say the least, a judgment 
founded on a happily-found formula of systems 
which, when applied, as Paley applied it, to 
all possible moral and civil relations, acquires 
more weight and value only in the minds of 
those who are already converted. The influ- 
ence which the works of Bentham have on 
English ethics depends not so much on their 
speculative merit as on the strong connection 
and sure and absolute tone of his affirmations ; 
we say affirmations, because, even if he dis- 
cusses and analyzes keenly in various parts of 
his works, his observations are seldom to the 
true philosophical points of the doctrines, or 
to their development in history. In his rapid 
and nervous style thought has an effect like 
a few strokes of the artist's brush which, being 
broadly and decidedly put on, give life to a 
whole figure ; and to his qualities as a writer 
is perhaps due, in a great measure, the reputa- 



122 Ethics of Positivism. 

tion which he enjoys in Europe as the most 
illustrious propounder of Utilitarian theories. 

Inductive ethics may be said to have reached 
in Paley and Bentham the degree of scientific 
maturity in which Positivism found it. Other 
great writers who professed it in the early 
part of the present century, as James Mill and 
John Austin, simply contributed to the further 
development of its principles by elucidating 
and amplifying them through psychological 
analysis and through the doctrine of associa- 
tion. In reviewing the history of the great 
question of morals, as defined so far, we see 
that it was agitated by the highest minds of 
northern Europe for more than two centuries 
and a half. It was first agitated between 
Hobbes and the metaphysicians, and it con- 
tinued to be discussed between the school of 
Locke and the Scotch school, with the tri- 
umph of the latter. It ended with Bentham, in 
whom Utilitarian views almost absolutely pre- 
dominated, and we see it finally culminate in 
the ethical system of the Positive school. 
While the rude egotism of Hobbes seems to 



The Theory of the Moral End. 123 

find affinity in the psychological method and in 
the analyses of Locke and Hume, the undenia- 
ble evidence of disinterested affections and of 
moral ideas which the opponents set forth in 
favor of their theory of experience causes the 
inductive method to be further improved by 
the theory of association. This is an example 
of the achievements which are attained by the 
opposition of opinions in a broad and impar- 
tial discussion ; and it is also an example of 
the intimate relation between the intellectual 
life of a nation and its history. The advance 
and improvement which we have been con- 
sidering in English ethics as taking place since 
Hobbes, even in the midst of the contradic- 
tions of two great schools, is in the world 
of thought what in the civil life of England 
has grown out of the good sense of the two 
parties which, although they have divided it 
for some centuries, do not impair its strength ; 
and, balancing each other in power, those 
parties preserve and develop its institutions. 



124 



Ethics of Positivism. 



VI. 

The foregoing historical considerations will 
enable us to undertake more confidently the 
analysis of the Positive doctrines concerning 
the idea of good ; because this Utilitarian the- 
ory implies such a variety of elements that 
even the most careful critic may become con- 
fused in analyzing it unless he considers tra- 
ditionally the various scientific results which, 
like strata in new ground, have accumulated 
to form it. ^The Utilitarian theory of the end, 
as we find it defined by English writers, implies 
all the tendencies of the empirical method and 
of the selfish philosophy of Hobbes, the crit- 
ical review of moral principles initiated by 
Locke, and the conception of universal utility, 
as it appears well defined for the first time, and 
the direction of Bentham's views ; besides, it 
does not exclude the theological ideas of Paley, 
nor does it exclude the ideas of sympathetic 
affections held by Cumberland and Adam 
Smith ; and, finally, it explains disinterested 
sentiments and the conception of duty by the 



The Theory of the Moral End. 125 

theory of association. All this material, which 
preceding schools have already elaborated, the 
new school wants to put in a new form and 
give it a value of method. It has, however, 
been well to point out what old elements have 
prepared the new doctrines, and the improve- 
ments which opposed schools have made in 
them, in order to avoid the mistake, commonly 
made by some modern critics, of recognizing ab- 
solute originality in every theory recently enun- 
ciated. Losing sight of the traditional course 
of philosophy, they are apt to throw doubt 
upon the progress of thought, so that we often 
see philosophical development denied in our 
day, when such progress is manifest in the very 
doctrines of the opposition. 

In examining the present state of philosoph- 
ical studies in the English school, it is easily 
seen that utilitarian morality prevails both on 
account of the number of adherents it has and 
of the favorable consideration which it gener- 
ally receives from modern scientific thought. 
This prevalence, however, is not sufficient to 
prevent the frequent balancing of the two 



126 Ethics of Positivism. 

schools in the broad and careful discussion of 
principles in which nearly the entire English 
Press participates. If the Utilitarian theory of 
morality is supported by such eminent men as 
Bain, Mill, Bailey and Spencer, 1 the school of 
Intuition is represented by others equally cele- 
brated : for instance, Whewell and Mansel. 
The former presented, in his Lessons on the 
History of Moral Philosophy in England, 
a system which Mill deemed worthy of a long 
and sound confutation from him. In that sys- 
tem Whewell modified the opposed doctrines 
so as to demonstrate that in the harmony of 
pleasure and honesty with wisdom consists the 
good which is to be the end of life. The latter 
sets forth with new and strong arguments the 
distinctive qualities of moral ideas, and de- 
sumes their absolute value from a Divine nature. 
The theory of intuition, supported as it is by 

1 James Frederick Ferrier (1808-64), who belongs to 
the experimental psychological school, points out, in his 
Lectures on Greek Philosophy, that he departs from the 
doctrine which substitutes happiness for virtue as su- 
preme good. 



The Theory of the Moral End. 127 

men of high authority and profound thought, 
finds support also among the more cultivated 
class of people, to the influence of which we 
may attribute the fact that the expounders of 
Utilitarianism have sometimes publicly discoun- 
tenanced the extreme consequences of the Posi- 
tive method and deprecated the notion that they 
are followers of Auguste Comte. These and 
other reasons, which we have before pointed 
out, explain how the doctrine of Utilitarianism, 
as it appears in the works of some English 
and European writers, proceeds on one of the 
broadest and truly reconciling methods that have 
been adopted in the pursuit of ethical studies. 

It would be out of place, on this occasion, 
to expose in full the substance of the new doc- 
trines. It may suffice to say that they do not 
essentially differ from the old doctrines. It 
is ever the same philosophy which, setting out 
with a theory of sense, represents the end 
of human life as immediate or future pleasure 
or its equivalent : well-calculated utility. A 
philosophy which mistakes the consequences of 
an act for its moral value ; it mistakes moral 



128 Ethics of Positivism. 

sanction, whatever it may be, for the law of 
good ; a philosophy, therefore, which overlooks 
the essential difference between the object of 
pleasure and the object of dirty. This is a 
doctrine which may be summarized in what 
Mill and many others have accepted reactions 
are right in proportion as they promote happi- 
ness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse 
of happiness. But happiness has so broad a 
meaning that in it we may include all the low- 
est and highest pleasures of the individual and 
of society. ; ■ The historical progress of the theory 
ruled by the principle of utility can therefore 
be measured by the progress which this simple 
idea of the end has made from age to age, with- 
out considering whether it grew so as to absorb 
gradually new elements of the moral act, or its 
application extends from individual to social 
well-being. JSTow, the progress of contempora- 
neous systems in the latter respect is undenia- 
ble. The philosophy based on sense could only 
profess an absolute and vulgar egotism; but 
the influence of contrary schools, combined 



The Theory of the Moral End. 129 

with the doctrines of Hartley and with the 
method of interior observation, prepared the 
development of the principle which recognizes 
as the only end of human actions, not the great- 
est good of the individual, but the greatest 
good of the greatest number. 1 Notwithstanding 
the tendency of Bentham to a less broad doc- 
trine, Mill, Bain, and all the schools to which 
they belong, agree on this principle, and en- 
deavor to prove it does not disagree with the 
substance of their system ; nay, actuated by 
the power of sympathies and of mutual aifec- 
tions, they go so far as to justify individual 
sacrifice for the good of the many. What 
force such arguments may have will be known 
to whoever meditates on the consequences of 
the premises of the Utilitarian school. 

Not less worthy of note is another late im- 
provement of the Utilitarian theory. The ob- 
jections which were made to it, owing to the 
anxiety which certain fastidious and popular 
systems excited in some generous natures, were 

1 See Chapter ii. Utilitarianism. By John Stuart Mill. 



130 Ethics of Positivism. 

based principally on the moral degradation of 
actions supposing that the only aim of man is 
a discrimination between pleasure and pain. 
This consequence was not noticed by Bentham, 
but Mill thought of obviating it, in determin- 
ing by a law of feeling the nature of the pleas- 
ures and pains which the Utilitarian school re- 
gards as the end and sanction of our acts. Such 
pleasures and pains, he says, are the pleasures 
and pains of man, and not those of the brute ; 
they are the highest affections of the soul and 
of intelligence ; and it is in conformity to the 
principle of utility to recognize, in fact, some 
kinds of pleasures much more desirable and 
of much more value than others. This ob- 
servation becomes Mill and the reconciling 
spirit of his doctrines; but such an observa- 
tion is not necessarily prompted by the prin- 
ciple of his doctrines ; because, as a contempo- 
rary has well remarked, if we examine w T hat 
those pleasures really are, we find that very 
few would propose them as the purpose of their 
conduct, and Mill's principle, based on the great- 



The Theory of the Moral End. 13 L 

est good of the greatest number, seems to con- 
tradict his system. 1 

This instance leads us naturally to another. 
Considering the infinite variety of customs and 
conditions under which man lives, it is very 
difficult, if not impossible, to determine what 
is the greatest pleasure, the true utility of 
man. Nor need the believers in Mill's doc- 
trine answer that the standard of our judgment 
will be the pleasure to which all, independently 
of any sense of moral obligation, will give the 
preference. In the first place, of what pleas- 
ure can we say so much ? In nothing else are 
the individual and society, even aside from 
the different natures of individuals, more liable 
to change under the influence of the times, 
and, thus changing the type, the ideal of pleas- 
ure will change whenever the claim of utilita- 
rian obligation changes. And would it not be 
better, since we need a certain moral standard, 
to recognize it in that immutable idea of duty 
which the adherents of the school in question 

1 A Few Words on Utilitarianism. By Robert Wil- 
liams. 



132 Ethics of Positivism. 

regard only as illusory, notwithstanding the 
fact that it is regarded in conscience as the 
only inevitable motive by which conduct should 
be determined ? Moreover, granted that the 
highest and true happiness of humanity could 
be found in certain conditions, who will assure 
us that those conditions will ever be realized ? 
The laments on the miseries of life are the 
expressions of the human voice which resounds 
perhaps in the remotest history of the world. 
The great poets who, in all ages, have been 
the interpreters of that voice ; the great bards 
who, meditating on themselves, could catch one 
single note of that sad harmony of the heart, 
have always been the most popular, and have 
never become obsolete. This proves that every 
age and every nation has its sorrows, as every 
stage of life has its fears. If Greece had Sap- 
pho and the Romans Lucretius, we have Byron 
and Leopardi. 

But Mill, like a true Englishman, does not 
give in, but insists on the point of his doctrine 
upon which conciliation is most possible.V. The 
happiness which he proposes as the end of 



The Theory of the Moral End. 133 

human actions is, according to him, the high- 
est and most continuous enjoyment ; it is the 
comparative tranquility of an honest and labo- 
rious life for the good of our kind. By a fine 
analysis of human tendencies he tries to show 
what a large source of pleasure is to be found 
in the exercise and cultivation of the mind : in 
the objects of nature, the improvements of art, 
a poetical imagination, the memories of the 
past, and the expectations of the future. He 
does not confine himself to the individual ; 
but, including in his consideration the whole 
life of a people, he shows that it is reasonable 
to hope, in the present state of knowledge, that 
art and science, in opposition to the difficulties 
of life, will, in time, diminish and remove most 
of its troubles. The picture which the great 
English philosopher draws of a happy man is, 
undoubtedly, beautiful ; nor can we say that 
it is impossible, because we believe in progress 
ourselves; but, besides that the ideal to which 
he points is far beyond the real, what w T e do 
not quite understand is that Mill should ever 
have thought that in such a way he might 



134 Ethics of Positivism. 

have strengthened the moral question from his 
point of view. That a certain degree of hap- 
piness can be attained to by man, and that he 
may realize it by virtuous acts — nay, that real 
utility is always connected with honesty, no 
serious supporter of absolute morality can or 
will question. But the question is not on this 
point. In pondering on what the moral end 
of life may be, the moralist does not mean 
to find out what is, or what may be, the con- 
sequence, or even the ultimate result, of an 
action ; he accepts the word end in the high- 
est and purest sense that human will has yet 
given it ; in which sense it implies, not what 
follows actions, but the law of the action in 
that which precedes and determines it. It is 
manifest, therefore, that any question on mor- 
ality must be a question of the moral end of 
our acts. The moral principles of human 
conduct cannot be absolutely deduced from a 
doctrine which finds the claim to obligation 
in a conception the elements of which are 
known to us only when we know the effects 
of our acts. We shall hereafter see that. 



The Theory of the Moral End. 135 

even according to the supporters of this theory, 
one of its most unsatisfactory points is what 
we have alluded to. We have meanwhile 
suggested it before examining the philosophi- 
cal process which the Positive school be- 
lieves to have strengthened the foundation on 
which rests its doctrine. 

til 

This process is fully shown in Mill's work 
entitled Utilitarianism. The great English 
economist had previously treated the subject 
in two long articles in the Westminster He- 
view. One of them, written in 1838, is a dis- 
cussion on the doctrines of Bentham ; to the 
other, which he wrote long before, we have 
already alluded in connection with the moral 
writings of Whewell. But in these articles 
Mill only examined the principle of utility 
in its applications and in connection with a 
criticism of it by two of his contemporaries. 
He subsequently proposed to expound that prin- 
ciple, as he conceived it, in full relation to 
the moral and civil orders, and endeavored 



136 Ethics of Positivism. 

to refute thus all the objections raised against 
it by opposed schools, and correct all its mis- 
interpretations. Such is the resume of the 
work the principle of which we have just dis- 
cussed, and the method of which we shall pres- 
ently examine. There is not in it any lack of 
that precision of conception and form, that re- 
rum lucidus or do, characteristic of writings 
which include in a brief space a broad sweep of 
meditation ; nor can we deny, if we take into 
account the inevitable insufficiencies of the 
subject, that this work of Mill gives, in as 
brief a space as possible, the most accurate 
idea of the doctrine of Utility at the most 
mature stage of its development since Bentham. 

After prefixing a chapter on general con- 
siderations, and another on the true meaning of 
his doctrine, the author begins the discussion 
of the subject proper in the third chapter, in 
which he speaks of the ultimate sanction of 
the Utilitarian principle. 

Of the essential properties of moral ideas 
known to us through moral perception, none 
is more certain than their binding influence on 



The Theory of the Moral End. 137 

our actions. It is manifested both in sentiment 
and judgment. Homicide, fraud, theft and the 
like we not only, without any sense of self- 
interest, abhor and naturally shun, but we 
consider them afterward by the light of rea- 
son and see them harmful, wicked in them- 
selves. It is true that we feel so because we 
perceive in the perpetration of such acts the vio- 
lation of a law that appeals to conscience ; but 
the same remorse which continues in the crimi- 
nal, the feeling of a violated obligation, is not 
always the consequence of his opposition to 
certain measures, the results of which' might 
be beneficial to himself. This difference is 
unquestionable, and is still a great difficulty 
for Utilitarians to surmount whenever they 
claim constant, binding force for their principle. 
The English philosopher that we are considering 
saw this difficulty, and with more vigor than 
Bain, who derives the efficacy of moral ideas 
from positive laws without caring to explain fur- 
ther, asks wherein is the binding force of the 
Utilitarian principle : the force which he calls the 
sanction of the principle. The sanction, he 



138 Ethics of Positivism. 

replies, of any other principle is also the sanc- 
tion of the Utilitarian principle. It is both in- 
ternal and external. The external is the hope 
of favor and the fear of displeasure from our 
fellow-creatures, or from the Ruler of the Uni- 
verse ; the internal sanction, which is the same 
whatever may be the fundamental principle of 
morals, is reduced to an internal state — to a pain 
more or less intense which in properly cultiva- 
ted moral natures attends the violation of 
duty. This feeling, if disinterested and con- 
nected with the pure idea of duty, is the essence 
of conscience. From his previous words we see 
how conscience is for Mill a derived and com- 
plex phenomenon ; the mixed result of associa- 
tions and sympathies, of love and fear. Religious 
feelings, recollections of childhood, social ego- 
tisms and affections are elements of conscious- 
ness. We shall presently see whether history 
affords proofs in support of the Utilitarian view 
of moral perception. A view which implies, as 
it were, a geological inquiry of the mind, be- 
cause Utilitarians see in consciousness nothing 
but an accumulation of moral strata superadded 



The Theory of the Moral End. 139 

to each other through education aud civiliza- 
tion. 

At this point the positive method pursued 
bj him in his work appears more clearly, fa> Two 
questions are in Mill's mind. In common with 
Bain, he finds the moral principle within the 
narrow range of the subject itself, basing the 
idea of duty and the sanction of our acts on 
a complexity of feelings and ideas. We might 
question whether those feelings and ideas are 
the product of nature or of habit. This ques- 
tion he seems to obviate very easily, replying 
that it matters very little whether they are in- 
nate or not so long as they are natural and spon- 
taneous and manifest a law, an inherent activity 
of the mind. In this we agree with him to a 
certain point ; but this method of removing the 
difficulties of the subject does not seem to be 
equally effectual when applied to another ques- 
tion, raised by himself, on the existence of an 
absolute object, an object distinct from mind, 
to which moral force may be referred. The 
philosophers who are not satisfied with the so- 
lution of this problem on pure grounds of ex- 



140 Ethics of Positivism. 

perience Mill calls transcendental, and are those 
who object to his view of sanction. He makes 
an internal fact, a feeling, an idea, the only 
ground of duty ; but does the idea of obligation 
spring from conscience, and is not this con- 
science, as he says, a phenomenon ? Therefore, 
how can an absolute standard of conduct be 
deduced from a mutable and subjective fact, 
a standard which will ever be a principle on 
which a science of morality can be based ? 
Mill replies : Whatever a person's opinion 
may be on this point of ontology, the force 
he is really urged by is his own subjective 
feeling, and is exactly measured by its strength. 
Aside from that internal fact there is no obliga- 
tion; and the idea of an absolute object related 
to the law of right does not give any more 
weight to the authority which conscience gives 
to the moral command. 

An able opponent of the Positive doctrines, 
H. Hodgson, resumes his polemic against them 
in his Theory of Practice, observing that they 
always confound a matter of fact with a point 
of science. Mill uses a very subtle logical 



The Theory of the Moral End. 141 

artifice. He claims to show that Reason, in 
assenting to the idea of an objective principle 
which may be the law in the fulfilment of vir- 
tuous acts, is not to be regarded as the direct 
and explicit motive which determines the moral 
act. The direct motive of the moral act is, 
according to him, a sense of obligation ; and 
he claims that if he can prove that such a 
fact of consciousness is the only sanction of 
all morality, and can demonstrate by a scien- 
tific analysis that that sense of obligation is 
the source of the general idea of utility, his 
system will also be demonstrated. At this 
point the mistake or the ambiguity of his reas- 
oning, is, as usual, implied in an imperfect 
analysis of internal phenomena, in the half- 
way psychology to which the Positive school, 
impatient of speculation, recurs whenever it 
deems it opportune. No one will question 
to Mill that the moral standard of right and 
wrong assumes a subjective and sensible form 
in the conscience of man in proportion as that 
standard influences him. If an atheist, a utili- 
tarian and a theist were agreed on the per- 



142 Ethics of Positivism. 

formance of some solemn duty, they could not 
express the motive of their conduct otherwise 
than, We feel obliged. But this expression 
does not explain all. That obligation, we ad- 
mit, is a motive, a direct antecedent, from 
which our will cannot be separated without 
incurring the painful feeling of self-reproach ; 
but there is, besides all this, a higher motive : 
the object of moral judgment which would have 
an efficiency, it is true, without the concurrence 
of the free mental activity which causes us 
to either accept or reject that judgment, but 
in the absence of that activity this object of 
moral judgment is the true and determining 
cause of the act. This object is the idea of 
right in itself. It has its source in the ab- 
solute, and is the beacon which throws light 
on the varied and manifold realm of facts. 
Considered in its pure ideal aspect, this idea 
illumines but does not verify, unless its in- 
fluence is brought to bear on feeling and the 
will by the mysterious law of the inner 
unity of man. We may then ask what 
would be the value of the sense of obligation 



The Theory of the Moral End. 143 

in a rational being if that which is imposed 
on him as a guidance of conduct is not recog- 
nized by him as a supreme and infallible 
object of reason. Considering duty, therefore, 
as a pure fact in the subject which fulfils it, 
it is in itself inexplicable, and has no more 
elements of morality than instinct or appetite. 
It assumes the nature of a moral fact as soon 
as the philosopher discovers its intimate and 
necessary relationship with the highest ter- 
minus : the law of right. In determining the 
idea of a moral standard within the very limits 
of science, it makes a difference whether we 
draw that idea from the efficacy of an absolute 
object above the mind, or from the conception 
of the useful, which we form through subjective 
affections alone. The two sides of the idea 
may become indistinct in the immediate per- 
petration of the act ; but the difference of those 
two sides, and sometimes even their contrast 
which we perceive through reflection, is what 
causes us to become conscious of merit or de- 
merit, and furnishes the data on which we may 
judge of the morality or immorality of our 



144 Ethics of Positivism. 

actions. The sense of injustice exercised to- 
ward another, which prompts us to a hasty 
vengeance, is not yet properly a moral fact; it 
is not a moral fact until we reflect and become 
conscious that in defending the weak we ex- 
ercise a right and fulfil a duty. Now, there 
does not seem to be any essential difference 
between the former instinctive act and the blow 
with which the assassin strikes down an officer 
to save the life of his comrade, and there is not 
at first sight anything which will prevent us 
from seeing a utilitarian tendency in both acts. 
But the difference becomes very clear as soon 
as the philosopher refers those acts to the ab- 
solute standard of morality. He then perceives 
that the utilitarian tendency is in conformity 
to the law in the first impulse, while it is not in 
the reflection we allude to above. 

By the imperfect analysis in which Positive 
moralists indulge to observe the human fact 
as the physicist observes the fall of a body, 
they recognize the direct motive of an act 
which is generally the result of instinct, or 



The Theory of the Moral End. 145 

an involuntary impulse, in place of the causes 
which make us truly conscientious in our ac- 
tions. Mill's Utilitarianism seems erroneous 
when, from the mere fact that man, as he al- 
leges himself, is prompted to aid his fellow- 
creatures by sympathetic impulses, he claims 
to scientifically deduce that such aid is for us 
a true moral obligation. For, it is impossible, 
as a modern critic observes, to deduct or induct 
the most remote idea of the obligation to do 
or not do something from the fact alone, from 
the fact not considered by the light of a 
superior principle. If Mill had carried his 
investigation further, and had tried to find 
in some social sympathies the true reason why 
some acts, which find their origin in those 
sympathies, are in conscience morally obliga- 
tory, he would have found it in a higher idea — 
in the absolute law of right, by which alone 
all distinction between private and public wel- 
fare is destroyed and the relative is harmonized 
with the absolute good. 



146 



Ethics of Positivism. 



Yin. 

In that part of the third chapter of Mill's 
work which we have just considered, the author 
has to remove the instances adduced in contra- 
diction of the subjective origin of the Utilitarian 
standard of morality. But his premises are 
such that another difficulty, no less important 
than those we have referred to, meets him at the 
start. He founds morality on a sense of mutual 
obligation, but since it is obviously easy to oppose 
him on the ground that such a sense, considered 
in itself as originating in the subject, can lose 
strength or altogether change, he would show 
how the bonds of social feeling are strengthened 
by the fact that the contrast of private interests 
disappears in the common good. At this point 
Mill reminds us of the architect who, being per- 
fectly satisfied with the artistic effect of the de- 
sign of a structure, forgot the importance of 
solid foundation, and, being obliged to build on 
soft ground, thought that he might get over the 
trouble by thoroughly binding together the upper 
parts of the edifice. Here also individual good is 



The Theory of the Moral End, 147 

made the principal factor in the Utilitarian doc- 
trine. It is in the premises, and is implied in his 
inferences from the pure and simple instinctive 
tendency of the individual to self-comfort; which 
tendency becomes a wish for the good of others 
when we reflect that it is necessary to live uni- 
ted, that discord has evil consequences, and that 
cooperation of desires causes assimilation be- 
tween the members of society, so that private 
welfare increases in proportion to the well-being 
of the public, j We do not deny that all this is 
set forth with much art and truth by the great 
English philosopher, who, overlooking the weak 
points of his doctrines, perceived that the only 
way by which the Utilitarian school could 
be reconciled with modern philosophy was to 
efface, as much as possible, in those doctrines, 
the traces of their origin in the selfish -philos- 
ophy of Hobbes. 

, For the rest, the harmony which he finds 
between individual interest and universal utility 
are facts which, however multiplied, will ever be 
a splendid confirmation of the fact that there is 
a harmony between absolute order and happi- 



148 Ethics of Positivism. 

ness, and, considered by themselves, these facts 
will never point to the law which causes that 
harmony. The inclination to do good to others 
because it will finally prove useful to ourselves 
is a phenomenon of instinct ; and although that 
inclination turns afterward to a desire, we are not 
aware that any Positivist has yet shown why and 
how it happens that, according to our conscience, 
it is an absolute duty to benefit others even 
when the consequences of the performance of 
that duty may be injurious to ourselves ; nor has 
any member of that school yet shown how we 
must not and are not prompted to act otherwise 
by the same instinct. The result of the present 
advanced stage of civilization is the identification 
of individual interests with universal good, and 
no one can assume that the internal and everlast- 
ing power of those absolute, moral ideas which in 
times of loose passions and irresistible instincts 
could oppose a law to the unlimited cravings of 
rebellious natures is not what caused that result 
to become constituted, as it is at present, an un- 
deniable principle of common-sense. 

These and other critical remarks can be made 



The Theory of the Moral End. 149 

on the third chapter of the book in question, 
where Mill founds his doctrine of utility on con- 
science. The other two chapters of the work 
contain an analysis of the moral elements of con- 
sciousness with the intention to eliminate from 
it any absolute principle, and reduce all such ele- 
ments to a conception of utility through a law of 
association. "We shall shortly examine the possi- 
bility and value of a method which Ave might 
call a method of the resolution and reduction of 
ethical phenomena, and we will subsequently 
consider the historical data on which the Posi- 
tivists rely to explain the genesis and the for- 
mation of the moral faculty. 



IX. 

All ethical and psychological questions in 
the English school turn on the theory based 
on the analysis and reduction of internal phe- 
nomena. Although the earliest traces of that 
theory are found in Locke and Hume, it was 
first outlined by Hartley, and subsequently 
brought into clearer relief by some philoso- 



150 Ethics of Positivism. 

pliers at the beginning of the present century. 
It is in our times, however, that the human 
mind, mature with scientific observation, in- 
dulges in a more universal and deeper study 
of method. The two directions of thought man- 
ifested by Galileo and Descartes led to one end 
by different ways during the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries. It is plainly seen that, 
by those methods, a synthetic philosophy has 
gradually been created in which the modern 
mind appears to be steadily and almost pain- 
fully absorbed. Philosophy assumed the char- 
acter of psychology in Locke's Essay, and phil- 
osophers at that time had. full knowledge of 
the inductive process and of the expediency of 
analysis, at least in so far as they applied it in 
the examination of the human understanding, 
as it clearly appears from some of the works of 
Leibnitz. Philosophy, however, failed to real- 
ize its relationship with other methods of think- 
ing until the Scotch, Kant, Biran and Galluppi 
gave an impulse to philosophical inquiry show- 
ing that the problem of the laws governing facts 
is one and the same both in the science of mind 



The Theory of the Moral End. 151 

and that of bodies. This is the reason why in 
England, where, since Bacon, the inductive 
method had been more fully adopted in all the 
departments of knowledge, Hartley so soon an- 
ticipated the theory which would identify physi- 
ology with inner experience. It is also the 
reason why Auguste Comte's views did not 
seem so novel to the English mind, and easily 
found a place in certain unbroken traditions of 
method. A proof of this is the theory of as- 
sociation which was vaguely stated a few years 
before the dawn of the Positive philosophy, a 
theory which was not altogether new when 
Hartley first presented it in a somewhat defi- 
nite form. Such a doctrine implied simply the 
presumption that the working of the mind is 
analogous to the process of molecular aggrega- 
tion and disintegration, and was made the sub- 
stratum of psychology as soon as the mere 
possibility of reducing all internal facts to one 
law received a certain methodical value through 
the direction of modern scientific thought. 

The A?ialysis of the Phenomena of Hu- 
man Ifind, by James Mill, however imperfect 



152 Ethics of Positivism. 

it may be in certain particulars, is of great his- 
torical value, marking the stage at which psy- 
chology appears to have first assumed the char- 
acter of natural science. In the preface to the 
edition of that work, published under the editor- 
ship of his son, John S. Mill, the method fol- 
lowed by the author is referred to the same 
principles upon which so much progress has 
been made in physics and in astronomy since 
Galileo and Newton. In commenting on the 
Positive doctrines we cannot therefore separate 
the doctrine which transforms moral facts by 
means of analysis from the method of which 
that doctrine is a part. Besides, this method 
having become common to all, or nearly all, 
modern psychologists, we cannot avoid looking 
into it and ascertaining, at least so far as we can, 
to what degree it is exact, while we will also 
consider its applications in relation to a gen- 
eral direction of modern science. 1 

In tracing the course of scientific progress 
since Galileo, we notice that the tendency 
which has brought the mind to a universal 
synthesis has been developing for over two 



The Theory of the Moral End. 153 

centuries and a half. It first appeared in the 
old idea of the universe, which has gradually 
given way to the current conception of a sys- 
tem of things in which prevails the harmony be- 
tween facts and laws. In the Dialoghi del 
Massimi Sistemi e delle JVuove Scienze, pub- 
lished in 1638, the blind man of Acetri antici- 
pated views that we now find enunciated by 
noted scientists like Humboldt, Secchi and 
Darwin. He foresaw that various movements 
of thought would be the result of the old studies 
in physics. The Italian sage who so early 
anticipated the theory that the innumerable 
phenomena are reducible to one was, even in 
that prediction, following a traditional path. 
The tendency of ancient thought in Eastern and 
Greek philosophy had been almost exclusively 
toward the investigation which was one day 
to bring to light the unity of all forces under- 
lying facts in general. From the Vedas down 
to the atomism of Epicurus we find evidence 
that the mind began to realize in its own unity 
a universal law which it identified in turn with 
the motions of visible forces or matter, or with 



154 Ethics of Positivism. 

ideal and quantitative relations, or with an 
animating principle of creation and with the 
phenomena of force and effect. The growth 
of the mind from presumed to real unity of 
phenomena, from the design to the origin of 
nature, is, however, what marks the progress of 
the science of the day. If everything is rela- 
tive, and law reigns throughout the universe, 
the secondary and complex laws must be con- 
vertible into the higher and more general laws, 
and the most complicated facts must further be 
referred to the constant operation of forces. 
But what appeared very clear many centuries 
ago is still the desideratum of science. Uni- 
versal unity is still what modern science strives 
to prove. So far from denying scientific 
progress, we recognize the wonderful achieve- 
ments of science in modern times ; but Bacon 
observes that science, like living organisms, 
develops, not by a successive growth of parts, 
but by the contemporaneous and harmonious 
grow 7 th of parts in the germ. Organic law is 
the unity of the component parts in one type, as 
the principle of science is the ideal unity which 



The Theory of the Moral End. 155 

reproduces in itself the real relations of facts. 
Now, in the primitive and general idea of a sys- 
tem in the mind of a solitary thinker the whole 
of a science may sometimes be faintly defined, 
and it is in this case that there is danger of ac- 
cepting an imaginary and superficial unity of 
things — an abstraction, in fact — in place of the 
real and profound unity which can be proved by 
facts alone. Such has ever been the history of 
the development of scientific thought. In any 
order of knowledge the human mind is apt to 
forerun conclusions and prematurely draw the 
final lines of a seemingly well-defined system. 
This mistake is the effect of the impatience as 
well as of the genius of man in all ages and 
places, and all the schools have generally 
blamed each other for such weakness, without, 
however, any mutually good result, because we 
observe that modern schools, not excepting the 
Positive, have the same unfortunate trait. 

Abstract ideas which reduce the concrete 
to forms implying schematism, generalizations 
based more on vague relations between facts 
than on the real unity of phenomena, have 



156 Ethics of Positivism. 

characterized the early stages of scientific 
progress. Although so unreliable a result of 
human imagination is generally nullified as the 
true positive method is adopted, we are apt to 
be misled again by our fancy as soon as we 
substitute hypothesis for real facts, or when we 
indulge in insufficient analysis and synthesis 
by disregarding actual facts. Every recent 
achievement in science seems to strengthen the 
arguments in favor of the theory of a perfect 
unity of facts and their laws, while it weakens 
the position of those who still endeavor to 
argue in support of old generalizations. It is 
also noteworthy that a higher and truer con- 
ception of the universe is generally the result 
of scientific inquiry. The theory of the har- 
mony of planetary motions initiated by Ptolemy 
could not stand because it had been inferred 
from appearances and a priori conceptions 
alone. That theory made the universe com- 
paratively insignificant, representing the infinity 
of space only as an order of planets revolving 
around a terrestrial center. Copernicus and 
Galileo discovered an infinity of worlds in 



The Theory of the Moral End. 157 

space ; but the observant genius that dis- 
covered the spots on the sun and on the moon, 
and observed the phases of Venus, and counted 
the rings of Saturn, saw that the relation be- 
tween satellites and their planets is the same 
relation of motion and gravity as of the planets 
and the sun. Kepler demonstrated that re- 
lationship quantitatively, and Newton verified 
it by the law of universal gravitation. All 
these discoveries were the result of the method 
of Galileo, who applied the mathematical cal- { 
dilation of facts to the laws of elementary 
motive forces. And while Descartes, depart- 
ing from that method, reduced the harmony of 
creation to empty geometrical formulas, the 
true conception of inertia which the Italian 
scientist substituted for the theory of peri- 
patetic motion, his experiments on liquids 
and sounding bodies and on the forces of co- 
hesion and affinity were leading the mind to 
a field of productive analogies between terres- 
trial and celestial dynamics. The entire system 
of the universe is at present regarded as mov- 
ing around one center. The hypothesis of a 



158 Ethics of Positivism. 

universal impulse, and the other hypothesis of 
an imponderable fluid as a common medium of 
vibration, induce the mind to conceive light, 
heat, electricity — any form of physical force — 
as modes of motion. Chemistry, applied to 
the science of bodies and to industry, investi- 
gates the combinations and changes of matter 
and the modifications of the waves of light and 
heat in various substances, so that it penetrates 
ever more deeply into the essential structure of 
bodies ; while by the spectrum analysis it dis- 
covers the analogies between simple colors and 
terrestrial and celestial substances, and exposes 
the universal benefits of light upon life. The 
matter filling space is thus brought within the 
grasp of one force which closer investigation 
reveals as connecting the phenomena of the 
three orders of nature. The influx of light and 
heat on vegetable life, the influence of climate 
on the species and habits of animals and also 
on their origin and modifications, are facts 
affording evidence of the essential connection 
between the organic and inorganic world, be- 
tween geology and anatomy, and lead to 



The Theory of the Moral End. 159 

the doctrine which regards life itself as the 
effect of the uninterrupted development of 
forms extending from the zoophite to man. 1 

This concentric movement of thought has 
been rapid and sweeping. From 1812 to 1835, 
Cuvier and Bopp founded comparative anatomy 
and linguistics. There was, from the first, in 
both of these sciences a certain combination by 
which complex forms could be reduced one by 
one into the simplest. The complicated and 
connected systems and tissues of animals of the 
higher order are found to be included in one 
type of the lower order. Forms of speech 
which formerly could not be reduced, and which 
the student would connect in his mind only by 
means of terminations and tables, are now traced 
back to their origin, which is in turn referred 
to elementary phonetic laws. As Cuvier, in 
endeavoring to find a process of succession in the 

1 Deir TJnita delle Forze Fisiche, Preface and Conclu- 
sion, by Padre Secchi. Galilee, Les Droits de la Science 
et la Methode des Science Physiques, chaps, xiii et xiv, 
par Henry Martin : Paris, Didier. Evidence as to Man's 
Place in Nature, Introductory, by Prof. Huxley. 



160 Ethics of Positivism. 

forms of living animals, was induced to extend 
his observations to the growth of life through 
past ages, and built on a few unknown fragments 
of animal remains a theory that has led to an- 
other theory, which is fast becoming popular, so 
philologists have found an historical order in the 
development of language from the monosyllable 
to the flexion ; a superaddition of the more re- 
cent forms of speech to the older forms in lan- 
guages of the same family, articulations which, 
like spoils of thought, are strewn through lan- 
guages, are regarded by philologists as a series 
of strata in which human consciousness, aided by 
psychology and history, will some day fully re- 
cognize itself. 

Meanwhile, the great movement initiated by 
Yico, in the studies of antiquity, still continues. 
The natural science of races and of their tongues, 
combined with literary and archaeological re- 
searches, gradually raises the veil of mystery 
which hangs over the origin of human phenom- 
ena. As the geologist observes in the open 
country the primitive formation of an antedilu- 
vian ground, or a relic of the stone age, so the 



The Theory of the Moral End. 161 

historian is referred back to the primitive forms 
of human society and to the earliest ideas of re- 
ligion through the diligent study of a radicle 
monosyllable or even a myth. These are for 
him the first strata, as it were, to which through 
long ages have been superadded the legends, 
mythologies and tales — in fact, any tradition pre- 
ceding the age of civilization. We thus see 
that nations grow from primitive germs and fol- 
low a course of development which we find 
marked by a series of ideas and beliefs never 
wholly lost, but partly preserved in traditions 
and partly transformed in the consciousness of 
the multitude of the present. 



X. 

This great analytical movement leading to a 
universal synthesis has laid the foundations for a 
new science of the mind. As soon as scientists 
became conscious of the continuity of phenomena 
they no longer observed them as the solitary 
and personal forms of Greek and Eastern my- 
thologies ; nor did they lose sight of phenomena 



162 Ethics of Positivism. 

in the haze of abstraction. Phenomena were 
then regarded as truly concrete and palpable 
facts in which thought held the harmony of in- 
variable laws ; they were regarded as a succes- 
sion, as a history. The principle of progress 
was gradually conceived to pervade nature until 
we see the idea of development ruling the cur- 
rent conception of the universe. As soon as it 
was observed that in the inferior order of things 
there is a before and an after, a superaddition 
of activity to existence, it was inevitable that the 
whole being of mind should also be conceived to 
be under the influence of one universal law ; 
and mental progress, as shown in history, was 
accordingly accepted as the external indication 
of an essential motive force, a work of the mind 
transformed in itself. The basis of interior ob- 
servation was thus changed. The multitude of 
fixed faculties of which, according to the ana- 
lytical psychology of the Middle Ages, the mind 
was composed, the innate forms of the Cartesian 
philosophy and the mechanism of the Sensualists 
were to be succeeded by a more profound, a 
dynamically truer idea of inward life. Many 



The Theory of the Moral End. 163 

obstacles were to be surmounted, however, before 
so great a reform could take place in the mode 
of thinking. In England a partial and em- 
pirical analysis, in Germany an excessive 
synthesis and reduction. It is certain that 
Locke and Hume did not conclusively demon- 
strate a priori principles and forms, for the 
essential elements of the understanding were 
lost sight of in their hasty analysis. But Kant's 
finer criticism of those incomplete studies had 
certain good results to which we may hereafter 
refer. The celebrated work, The Critique of 
Pure Reason, marks the extreme point at which 
analysis had been carried in the history of 
philosophy. In that work was reproduced, un- 
der another form, that tendency to close ob- 
servation which in past ages had preceded the 
theories of modern physics. The theory of 
reduction begins after Kant and ends splen- 
didly with the Hegelian idea of absolute thought. 
It is therefore with truth that Rosenkranz 
saw in Kant the revolution and in Hegel the 
empire of modern philosophy. 

German idealism attempted a reduction 



164 Ethics of Positivism. 

which astonished Europe and the world ; but 
it made the mistake of generalizing carelessly, 
and of mixing concrete facts with the a priori. 
It is true that it originated in a more complete 
analysis than those of Locke and Hume, but 
the solitude in which Cartesian thought had 
laid for many centuries seemed to become in 
Kant an interminable region in which Fichte, 
Schelling and Hegel thought they saw a mir- 
age of both nature and mind. Although some 
wonderful analyses were the results of German 
criticism, its method cannot be said to have 
been strictly analytical : so that it could not 
ultimately avoid the extreme consequences of 
its principles. It was reasoning in a circle 
beginning with the categories as the forms of 
all known things, and ending by finding itself 
identical with the most abstract foundations 
of thought. The way to a general reduction 
was now open ; and the doctrine of universal 
development, drawing the mind nearer to the 
idea of will, likewise universal, caused Schopen- 
hauer to believe that the inner energy of things 
could also be reduced to the principle of that 



The Theory of the Moral End. 165 

doctrine. In the light of so many experiments 
it was natural that the scientific mind should 
try to penetrate further. But the long train 
of a priori deductions discouraged the boldest 
thinkers ; and the human mind, wearied with 
its own futile attempts to identify itself with 
nature, accepted external and internal — physi- 
cal and psychical — forces as a continuous trans- 
formation of matter. If Biichner and Mole- 
schott ever have any value in the history of 
philosophy it will be just because the unscien- 
tific haste of their materialism expresses the 
last, but necessary, result of a method which 
could be said to be a great error of analysis 
which led to a gigantic excess of synthesis. 
While some modern critics refute the concep- 
tion of force and cause as being irreducible to 
the reality of feeling, and recognize in force 
a self-expressing and organizing matter, they 
give to matter an idea, an inherent energy, 
by which it is disposed and coordinated into 
living organisms. 1 They do not seem to per- 



1 Lucrezio, chap, i, page 11, by G. Trezza. 



166 Ethics of Positivism. 

ceive that by this forced scientific explanation 
the unknown re-appears just in the direction 
where they attempted to explain it. These 
ideas of matter are neither Platonic nor Aris- 
totelian forms, nor even the forces implied in 
the dynamism of Leibnitz. They appear more 
like the dispersed fragments of a ruined specu- 
lative fabric than the evidences of a new phil- 
osophical edifice. There may be a powerful 
mind that will yet put those fragments into 
a comprehensible form, but for the present we 
only observe that between a new learned eclec- 
ticism declaiming against all philosophy, and 
a system of facts and ideas, preference is to 
be given to carefully considered particulars and 
to the loftiness of grand speculations ; for we 
are persuaded that on facts alone, strongly 
connected with ideas by a broad range of 
thought, experience can properly be made the 
ground of a doctrine, and science transformed 
into philosophy. 

One of the methods on which this trans- 
formation has been attempted is jthat of the 
English school, which follows a philosophical 



The Theory of the Moral End. 167 

patli lying between the excessive reduction 
of Idealism and the doctrines of Materialism, 
with a reservation which denotes neither pov- 
erty nor weariness of mind, but extreme respect 
and regard for truth. We have before had oc- 
casion to note how John S. Mill and Alexander 
Bain, although negative on some points of the 
question, do not altogether deviate from tradi- 
tion. The former preserves in his doctrine a 
vestige of the theory of liberty and responsi- 
bility ; and both give value to the analysis of 
internal facts ; while their doctrine of the moral 
standard does not admit disinterested feelings 
as original facts. It is indeed very creditable 
to the English school to pursue the study of so 
deep a question with a sense of caution charac- 
teristic of their nation. It shows that English 
philosophers realize that the essential condition 
of true scientific progress lies in not allowing 
the consequences to take them beyond the 
premises of their system, and in an unanimous 
confession of the weak points of their own doc- 
trines, and in never obstinately claiming, as men 



168 Ethics of Positivism. 

of mere pretense would, that they have said 
the last word of science. 

We do not mean to say that scientific mod- 
eration is a rare trait. We all know that among 
the most illustrious names of men that do honor 
to experimental research there are those of Lie- 
big, Wagner, Bernard, Tyndall, Agassiz, Qua- 
trefages, Hirn, Bufalini and Puccinotti, who 
represent opposition to Materialism. Yet, in 
the present movement of thought in experi- 
mental science the English naturalists and psy- 
chologists expound more definitely a doctrine 
which, if well understood, is conducive to 
what is properly a dynamism. We say, if well 
understood, and we insist on the meaning just 
on the authority of the founder of the 
school under consideration, Charles Darwin. 
A French expositor of the hypothesis of 
heredity applied to instincts has remarked 
that a singular literary process characterizes 
the writings of the great English naturalist. 
This characteristic is, according to the French 
critic, that Darwin very seldom openly asserts 
his doctrines. He is represented by him as 



The Theory of the Moral End. 169 

disposing of his facts so as to make his theories 
proceed from them as an unlooked-for induction 
still involved in a doubt implying prudence. 
It seems to us that in this respect the reserva- 
tions of this eminent man have been misunder- 
stood. Charles Darwin is not a man of letters ; 
he is a scientist, and as such he does not prepare 
his works to surprise his readers. In most of 
his productions we notice that he is ever careful 
to allow facts to speak for themselves ; he fol- 
lows those facts as far as conscientious expe- 
rience permits. As soon as the facts leave him 
he halts, no matter where he may be. He who 
is not ashamed to bow down before the Abso- 
lute, before the God of Newton and Galileo, 
who is enough of a philosopher and poet not 
to regard the idea of creation as a mark of 
mental retrogression, saw in the everlast- 
ing changes of things one more proof of the 
essential development underlying which are 
all the forces combined in that one universal 
force which the minds of Anaximander and 
Heraclitus, Aristotle and Bruno caught a glimpse 



170 Ethics of Positivism. 

of, many years ago. In the present state of 
knowledge, however, he does not feel safe in 
coming to the conclusion that if force is in mat- 
ter, then force is matter. He does not conclude 
that because the transformation of species from 
the embryo to the ape is physiologically de- 
monstrable, the intellectual and moral qualities 
of man, his indefinite perfectibility, are of little 
account in the great question of life. 

At any rate, we can affirm that Darwin, 
Mill, Bain and Spencer, holding in the general 
harmony of things the harmony of matter 
with force, of the inert with organism, do not 
Ppush their analysis so far as to represent that 
harmony as an absolute identity ; nay, Mill 
and Bain, as we have before noted, expressly 
make a distinction between the phenomena of 
consciousness and the phenomena of physiology, 
and make a particular study of the former. 
It has been unjustly remarked by some modern 
critics that, according to the English school 
of experimental ethics, psychological life is the 
effect of physiolological, and that physiology is 



The Theory of the Moral End. 171 

psychology itself. 1 The platonie idea of a close 
conflict between the soul and the body has 
long been dismissed on just grounds from the 
English school. Some of its members, as for 
instance Herbert Spencer, have sought in the 
former state of organs the germs of certain 
hereditary mental states; but we see in these 
daring exploits of an analytical mind the trait 
in the Scotch tradition of halting before the 
problem of the essential nature of facts and of 
their causes until science enables us to attempt 
its solution on more certain data. Such data 
we have not, and may never possess. In such 
a case the distinction which those philosophers 
have made between psychology and physiology, 
between the facts of consciousness and those of 
the body, will remain, not as a temporary 
means of method, but as a distinction made for 
a strictly scientific reason, even if we grant 
that, in the depth of existence wherein human 
perception cannot reach, all forces and all 

1 The contradiction of the above assertion is to be 
found in Principles of Psychology, second edition, Part 
I, page 140, by Herbert Spencer. London, 1870. 



172 Ethics of Positivism 

phenomena may be the effect of one and the 
same cause. 

XT. 

The English experimentalists do not, there- 
fore, endeavor to show that physical activity 
can be reduced to its organs, but that the vari- 
ous forms under which that activity is exhibited 
are convertible. First, between themselves and 
then to one common foundation — -feeling — 
which, in their acceptation, implies at once 
sensation, idea, sentiment and will. Associa- 
tion — the element which causes the motion of 
this matter, as it were, of internal facts — is 
the law of their connection and distinction 
under different forms; it is that which, like 
chemical function in organism, renews life by 
a process of assimilation and dissimilation. We 
have pointed out how the psychological obser- 
vation advocated by Hume, and accepted by 
the Positive school, caused the latter to see no 
possibility of any other law in consciousness ; 
and how that mode of observation was applied 
to disinterested feelings in the progress made 



The Theory of the Moral End. 173 

in moral analysis during the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries. The broad range of the 
inductive doctrines, which attracted English 
psychologists in the first half of the present 
century, explains the important influence which 
the conception implied in those doctrines has 
exercised ever since on those moral philoso- 
phers as the analogies between the mind and 
nature have gradually been multiplied and the 
universal law of life has been revealed, by 
the analysis and synthesis of acts and motions, 
as an indefinite development of forms and fac- 
ulties. The fact that, ever since Hartley, the 
law of association has been applied to the 
whole subject of mind by English psychologists 
proves a slow progress taking place in that 
school. This progress consists in giving the 
greatest generality to that law, in making of it 
a broader ground upon which the theory of the 
reduction of the various forms of psj^chical 
activity will rest without deviating from the 
intermediate pathway which, as we have pre- 
viously said, the English speculators on the 



174 Ethics of Positivism. 

question which occupies us seem to follow be- 
tween Materialism and Absolute Idealism. 

It has been said that, in the progress which 
English psychology makes by the method of 
association, there is noticeable a growing ten- 
dency to doctrines based on the mechanism 
of life. This assertion is to a great extent 
untrue. The law of association, as applied 
successively by various writers, from Hartley 
to Spencer, does not agree in substance with 
the so-called mechanical theory of things which, 
in matters of mind, reduces the facts of con- 
sciousness simply to a combination and inter- 
change of elements of sensibility. It is enough 
to make out the points upon which James Mill 
differs from those that have written on the 
subject since his time to see that the two 
theories essentially differ from each other. The 
nomenclature of John S. Mill's Logic, even 
crude and stiff as it* is, is a modification of 
the nominalism which so strongly characterizes 
the Analysis, and we see it change finally in 
Bain and Spencer to a truer idea of the harmony 
of mind with nature. James Mill, as Kibot 



The Theory of the Moral End. 175 

has justly remarked, was more of a logician 
than a psychologist, so that in his study of the 
workings of the mind he could not conceive it 
other than as an empty recipient for impres- 
sions which, retained and reproduced as faded 
and colorless vestiges of the objects which 
caused them, are what we call ideas. On this 
narrow basis, originally of Hume, his analysis 
proceeds. The rich variety of internal facts, in 
which Kant also saw a succession of original 
and irreducible acts, implies for James Mill 
simply the connection and disconnection of ele- 
ments that enter into sensations and ideas ; but 
none of those phenomena has a physiognomy 
of its own ; they all appear in consciousness 
and are lost like uniform and monotonous ca- 
dences in this one fundamental note : associa- 
tion. Classification, remembrance, imagination, 
abstraction, reasoning, and will have distinct 
names ; but the passage from one of those 
acts to another is not pointed out, as it is in 
Bain, nor is it obviated by a subtlety of analy- 
sis, as it is in Spencer. Reducing inward life 
to a double process of addition and subtrac- 



176 Ethics of Positivism. 

tion, the simplest transfer in thought of a note 
or sign, one greater or less degree of gener- 
ality, suffices to cause us to proceed in thought 
from the sensible of the most concrete nature 
to the finest idea. The mathematical criterion 
thus appears to be the sole measure of con- 
scious activity, as it is the measure of that 
silent, unconscious working of myriads of mo- 
lecular forces manifest in the changes of the 
bottom of the deep. 1 

This fundamental mistake in the Analysis 
of James Mill did not escape the critical at- 
tention of his son — John Stuart Mill — who 
alludes to it in a preface to the edition of 
this work published under his editorship. He 
says that what there is in the work that seems 
to need correction arises chiefly from two 
causes, one of which is the author's impatience 
of detail. For the rest, to John Stuart Mill 

1 Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human 3Ii)id, 
chaps, ii, iv, viii, ix. A new edition, with notes, 
illustrations and criticisms by Prof. Alexander Bain, 
A. Findlater and G. Grote ; edited, with additional 
notes, by John S. Mill, 1869. 



The Theory of the Moral End. 177 

cannot be attributed an important part in the 
development of English psychology. Whatever 
he did in that department is to be attributed to 
his subtle logical sense by which he seized any 
point which could in the least contribute to the 
scientific vigor of a demonstration. He was 
more the critic of method than the exponent of 
a doctrine. He o-ave the outline of a method 
in his System of Logic, referring, as we have 
before shown, judgment, reasoning, induction, 
and the ideas of cause and liberty to the law 
of association. In his Examination of Sir 
William Hamilton's Philosophy, he founded 
a theory of consciousness and perception on 
the law of association, a theory which was sug- 
gested to him, at least in part, by Berkeley. 
The parts of his criticism which, at first sight, 
appear to be distinctive traits of his philoso- 
phy, are essentially traceable to ideas of James 
Mill. In both father and son we find the same 
fastidiousness of ideal objectivity, absolute faith 
in abstraction and induction, impatience of truly 
profound analysis: the last of which traits, we 
may remark by the way, they have in common 



178 Ethics of Positivism. 

with Hume and the Sensualists. The logical, 
and, it seems to us, almost grammatical form- 
alism which made James Mill's Analysis so 
narrow, is greatly modified in the writings of 
his son. The inquiry of the phenomena of 
the mind is less constrained in John S. Mill 
than in his predecessor ; it assumed more 
breadth in him, under the influence of the 
Scotch school and the philosophy of Kant, and 
some of his doctrines, which were originally 
uncertain and obscure, have been supplemented 
and elucidated by the more recent doctrines of 
Bain and Spencer. Even if the explanation 
of the existence of matter and of self as a 
permanent possibility of sensations and of in- 
ternal states is not an original theory of John 
S. Mill's, because the question w r as thus treated 
by Hume and Kant, it is the great merit of this 
philosopher that he appreciated the difficulties 
of the problem, and expressed doubts that in- 
duced scientists to pursue a certain method 
with more hesitation but with better final re- 
sults. For instance, in his criticism of Sir 
William Hamilton's Philosophy, after resolv- 



The Theory of the Moral End. 179 

ing the mind into a series of feelings, he 
proceeds thus : " But, groundless as are the 
extrinsic objections, the theory has intrinsic 
difficulties which we have not yet set forth, 
and which it seems to me beyond the power 
of metaphysical analysis to remove. Besides 
present feelings, and possibilities of present 
feelings, there is another class of phenomena 
to be included in an enumeration of the ele- 
ments making up our conception of mind. 
The thread of consciousness which composes 
the mind's phenomenal life consists, not only 
in present sensations, but likewise, in part, of 
memories and expectations. !Now, what are 
these. In themselves, they are present feelings, 
states of present consciousness, and in that re- 
spect not distinguished from sensations. They 
all, moreover, resemble some given sensations 
or feelings of which we have previously had 
experience. But they are attended with the 
peculiarity that each of them involves a belief 
in more than its own present existence. A 
sensation involves only this ; but a remembrance 
of sensation, even if not referred to any par- 



180 Ethics of Positivism. 

ticular date, involves the suggestion and belief 
that a sensation, of which it is a copy or rep- 
resentation, actually existed in the past ; and 
an expectation involves the belief, more or less 
positive, that a sensation or other feeling, to 
which it directly refers, will exist in the future. 
Nor can the phenomena involved in these two 
states of consciousness be adequately expressed 
without saying that the belief they include is, 
that I myself formerly had, or that I myself, 
and no other, shall hereafter have, the sensa- 
tion remembered or expected. The fact be- 
lieved is, that the sensations did actually form 
part of the selfsame series of states, or thread 
of consciousness, of which the remembrance or 
expectation of these sensations is the part now 
present. If, therefore, we speak of the mind 
as a series of feelings, we are obliged to com- 
plete the statement by calling it a series of 
feelings winch is aware of itself as past and 
future ; and we are reduced to the alternative 
of believing that the mind, or Ego, is some- 
thing different from any series of feelings, or 
possibilities of them, or of accepting the para- 



The Theory of the Moral End. 181 

dox that something which ex hypotheses is but 
a series of feelings can be aware of itself as a 
series." 

At this point John S. Mill confesses that 
the question is inexplicable. We would say 
that it is still more mysterious when, in our 
inquiry into the most essential conditions of 
our spiritual existence, w r e consult conscious- 
ness for direct and definite evidence while we 
doubt its veracity. Another truly great merit 
of John S. Mill is that he not only doubted 
himself, but the sufficiency of his method, and 
recognized those in his country who could 
discover and make good the flaws in his sys- 
tem. On the publication of Bain's work, The 
Senses and the Intellect, John S. Mill made 
it the special subject of one of his articles 
which has lately been republished in one of 
the volumes of Dissertations and Discussions. 
He justly notes therein that Bain corrects a 
grave defect of the theory of association ; the 
defect implied in the absolute absence of ac- 
tive and spontaneous elements in the facts of 
the mind, which was accordingly regarded as 



182 Ethics of Positivism. 

merely the recipient of feelings and ideas ; a 
fault which, as Mill observes, some serious 
minds, such as Coleridge, had accepted as 
sufficient ground for dissenting from the doc- 
trine of Hartley. This observation of Mill is 
right; and, in a historical sense, suggests that 
John Stuart Mill marks the transition of the 
doctrines we are considering from the Anal- 
ysis to Bain and Spencer. 

Cartesian philosophy, which represented in- 
ward life as a series of fixed and innate ideas, 
was generally unable to perceive the finest 
differences and analogies of mental facts. It 
did not seize the transpositions and the inter- 
vals of mental facts which harmonize con- 
sciousness. Hartley and James Mill, reducing 
all internal facts to but one fundamental fact, 
resolved the immense variety of those facts into 
an indistinct complication implying neither or- 
ganism nor life. Bain does not substantially 
dissent from them. On one hand he takes into 
account the recent discoveries in physiology, a 
science in which he is very well versed ; on the 
other hand, he makes so deep an introspection 



The Theory of the Moral End. 183 

of internal facts as to give his inquiry, as he 
himself remarks, the character of a natural 
history of the feelings upon the basis of a 
uniform method of description. Interior obser- 
vation appears, therefore, to assume in Bain 
the characteristics of a truly scientific analysis, 
revealing each fact of inner life in its place 
with a physiognomy of its own; whereas, in 
his predecessors it was lost in minute details 
or varnished in too general conceptions. Suc- 
cession is, in Bain's theory, the real form of 
inward life, but it is an animated and living 
succession involved in consciousness. 

One of the most important parts of Bain's 
first work is the theory of the senses, the ap- 
petites and the instincts. The older investi- 
gators comprehended the animal facts of spon- 
taneity and of feeling in the too broad a term 
Sensation. The Scotch school and the school 
of Hartley did not sufficiently observe the alter- 
nations and the distinctions of those facts in 
the economy of the sentient subject. But Bain 
goes back to a primary element of activity pre- 
existing passive modifications; and in the in- 



184 Ethics of Positivism. 

distinct, primitive symptoms of animal life, 
such as in the random motions of an infant, 
he apprehends an automatic force involved in 
the organism ; a force which, becoming subse- 
quently involved in consciousness, is that which 
gives us the primary properties of bodies 
through muscular sensations. His analysis of 
such sensations, and his inquiries into the prim- 
itive manifestations of instinct and of affective 
powers, present to us one by one the links of 
the series implying the almost unconscious life 
of the infant, as the germs of the long series 
which culminates in the ideas, reasonings, de- 
sires and hopes of the adult. An analysis 
like this implies such a retrospective exam- 
ination as we can make of ourselves ; it is the 
gradual development of each element of human 
life into consciousness. The ruling principle 
of the work in question appears to have been 
inherited by Bain from Criticism. It is the 
principle which supposes in internal facts the 
reality of self and of things simply as a datum 
of the subjective and phenomenal reality of 
feeling ; and it does not substantially affect the 



The Theory of the Moral End. 185 

validity of investigations. We would almost 
say that psychological investigators would not 
have shown such subtlety of analysis if they 
had not realized the need of finding in internal 
facts alone that vivid sense of the real and 
of the necessary which Criticism, separating 
thought from its objects, seemed to make it 
an impossible task for those investigators to 
accomplish. 

But the consequences of the Positive method 
are not missing in Bain. The point of 
difficulty in his psychology, as in any psycho- 
logical theory, is not the explanation of the 
transformation from the simplest feelings to the 
most complex, from the eariiest impulses to 
instinctive motions, but to show in conscious- 
ness the point at which one phase of life ends 
and another begins ; the point at which sense 
and reason, instinct and will make up an har- 
mony involving such profound unity and such 
vivid and irreconcilable dualities. Bain meets 
the difficulty, abandoning, as he says, the 
old theory of faculties. As we are not 
affected by a single and invariable sensation, 



186 Ethics of Positivism. 

we become conscious when we realize changes 
in our mental states, and in these changes re- 
lations of difference and argument. We retain 
impressions which, upon being reproduced, the 
mind recognizes and classifies according to 
points of resemblance. The fundamental prop- 
erty of intelligence is therefore discrimination , 
and its law is the opposite between the sim- 
ilar and dissimilar; it implies a law of rela- 
tivity. To know is to perceive in what one 
thing agrees with or differs from something 
else. Thus the process of associating is in- 
cluded in psychological growth. Reducing the 
minimum of consciousness and of thought to a 
change resulting in two states different from 
feeling, with the first transition of one of those 
states to the other, there begins in us a series 
in which the differences of feelings become 
connected by a law of continuity, by resem- 
blances and classes. It is a series proceeding, 
by an arithmetical process, from the least to 
the greatest differences and resemblances, from 
the least perceivable and perceived relations 
between two sensations to the most remote 



The Theory of the Moral End. 187 

relations in the world of thought. The quan- 
titative standard is therefore applied by Bain, 
also ; it is, however, much modified and ap- 
plied on a broader basis in the course of his 
analyses. His criterion is not, like Mill's, a 
cold process of addition and subtraction of feel- 
ings and ideas ; it is a geometry of conscious- 
ness which substitutes the intervals and the 
continuity of feelings for points and lines, and 
with a few accessible data he gradually forms 
on those intervals and on the intermediate 
points between states of consciousness the liv- 
ing series which constitutes the mind. 

Alexander Bain endeavored also to explain 
the active elements implied in mental phenom- 
ena ; but the subtlety of analysis characteristic 
of his former work, The Senses and the Intel- 
lect, is wanting in his Emotions and Will. 
Descriptive precision, which generally marks 
the works of this distinguished philosopher, 
is particularly notable in this work in which 
his inquiry into the facts of inner life proceeds 
on a thorough knowledge of physiological con- 
ditions. Critics of authority have, however, 



188 Ethics of Positivism. 

represented him as being unsuccessful in his 
endeavors to scientifically classify the facts which 
he examines, a fault which may, at least in part, 
be accounted for by the highly involved nature 
of a point which has heretofore been the least 
studied in the province of psychology. Even 
if Bain did not succeed in forming a complete 
idea of the emotions, and particularly of the 
esthetic and moral emotions, as involving feel- 
ings to express which reason and affection mys- 
teriously concur, he made a real analytical study 
of the will, considering it in all its successive 
stages, from its origin, under physiological and 
instinctive conditions, from the earliest indica- 
tion of a voluntary power in the exercise of the 
senses and in the control of affections, to the 
conflict of motives implied in the process of 
deliberation. In the first part we have alluded 
to this most noteworthy work on a subject in 
the treatment of which Bain was preceded by 
Biran and Rosmini. It is in this remarkable 
treatise that the Scotch philosopher treats the 
question of the development of the will, a sub- 
ject which, we must admit, has never been suf- 



The Theory of the Moral End. 189 

ficiently studied by those of the old school of 
psychology 

Modern psychological inquiry reaches the 
highest degree of development in Herbert 
Spencer. He has in common with Bain the 
faculty of subtly analyzing details, and pursues 
the strict method of the Scotch school; but 
he surpasses Bain both by a more delicate sense 
of scientific organism and by a more profound 
intuition of relations. In psychology Bain 
stands to Spencer as in biology Cuvier stands 
to Darwin. Bain's analysis of the elements of 
psychical life, like Cuvier's investigations into 
the phenomena of animal life, discloses a con- 
stant succession of the various forms of the phe- 
nomena that he investigates. Darwin and Spen- 
cer perceive in the forms of the two orders 
which they respectively study a continuous 

1 The Emotions and the Will, completing a System- 
atic Exposition of the Human Mind ; second edition. 
On the Study of Character. Mental and Moral Science, Book 
III and IV. See also Ribot's English Psychology and 
Spencer's Essay on " Bain on the Emotions and the 
Will." - . - 



190 Ethics of Positivism, 

transformation, a process of growth and deri- 
vation. James Mill represented the facts of 
the mind as becoming associated on an indis- 
tinct foundation of sensation; in John S. Mill 
and Bain those facts superadd one to the other 
and distinctly develop in a serial sense. Ac- 
cording to Spencer, psychical facts interpene- 
trate each other, and one derives from the other 
under the constant efficacy of one universal law; 
so that to the idea of succession, which is the 
climax of Bain's theory. Spencer adds the bolder 
idea of an intrinsic evolution. 

The fundamental traits of Spencer's theory 
are marked out in his Essays Scientific, Po- 
litical and Speculative. Herein is given a 
broad exposition of the idea of progress which 
is the ruling principle of his doctrines. He 
applies that idea, in successive essays, to the 
genesis of the world, of society, and of intel- 
ligence. The architype of such progress is the 
succession from the simplest to the most com- 
plex stages of - growth in the individual organ- 
ism, by a process of differentiation and of 
transformation from the homogeneous to the 



The Theory of the Moral End. 191 

heterogeneous. He traces this principle of 
development throughout nature, from the prim- 
itive form of the solar system as a nebulous 
mass, and from the oldest structure of the crust 
of the globe, through all the successive stages 
of growth in the vegetable kingdom, to the 
most recently produced and consequently most 
complex organism — man. Society, industry, 
art and science follow an analogous course of 
evolution, and finally he explains the whole 
subject of mind by the theory of evolution. As 
nature, under its many aspects, is not any thing- 
finished and stationary, but something ever in 
process of formation, involving the unfolding 
of new and various forms from elementary 
germs, so mental life, which, like physical 
life, is a species of which life, properly so called, 
is the genus, does not result from a com- 
plexity of distinct forces superadded to each 
other, but implies a slow, gradual, and often 
imperceptible, unfolding, through one and the 
same activity. 1 The harmony between these 

1 Though we commonly regard mental and bodily- 
life as distinct, it needs only to ascend somewhat 



192 



Ethics of Positivism. 



two parallel series implies also their law. In 
the inferior orders of nature there is contin- 
uity between the grades of being and of life 
so that the transformations in those orders are 
generally insensible and unknown to us ; but 
between one form and another there are pro- 
portions of more or less direct correspondence 
with external circumstances, and that corre- 
spondence, originally simple and elementary, 

above the ordinary point of view to see that they 
are but subdivisions of life in general, and that no 
line of demarcation can be drawn between them 
otherwise than arbitrarily. Doubtless, to those who 
persist, after the popular fashion, in contemplating 
only the extreme forms of the two, this assertion 

will appear incredible It is not more 

certain that from the simple reflexion by which the 
infant sucks, up to the elaborate reasonings of the 
adult man, the progress is by daily infinitesimal 
steps, than it is certain that between the automatic 
actions of the lowest creatures, and the highest con- 
scious actions of the human race, a series of actions 
displayed by the various tribes of the animal kingdom 
may be so placed as to render it impossible to say of 
any step, Here intelligence begins." — Herbert Spencer's 
Principles of Psychology. 



The Theory of the Moral End. 193 

gradually becomes broader and more complex. 
Thus in every living thing, from the lowest 
form of life, confined to a tissue, to the most 
perfect organism, is reproduced the nature of 
its medium and of the conditions under which 
the organism develops. 

This universal law of life culminates in 
mind. From its root in organic life, mental 
activity develops into the most abstract forms 
of thought ; but between these two extremes 
there is a continuity of intermediate states in 
which the correspondence of internal with ex- 
ternal relations — the correspondence of mental 
with material life — extends to time and space, 
to the particular and to the general, and by 
the coordination of the different elements im- 
plied in that correspondence is produced the 
integration of the originally separate elements. 
This is a double process which he traces in all 
the successive stages of growth, from the earli- 
est ; and rudest mental state in which man 
moves hardly a few yards from his hut, and 
is unable to foresee astronomical phenomena 
by more than one year, to the intellectual con- 



194 Ethics of Positivism. 

dition in which eclipses are foretold and the 
parallax of stars measured to a most wonder- 
ful degree of precision ; from the zoophite, in 
which sight is but a dim glimmer, to the adult 
man who seizes the most minute differences of 
color and form, and perceives, in the twinkling 
of an eye, resistance and weight in the very 
idea of an object. 1 

According to this law of continuity, there 
are no such distinctions of faculties as it was 
thought by the old psychologists ; nor can a 
distinct line of demarcation be drawn between 
physiological find psychical facts, He does not, 
however, prejudge the question, and, without 
looking into the essence of things, he endeavors 
to perceive in the ever-changing and ascending 
course of internal phenomena the characteristic 
features of the gradual transformations from the 
lowest to the highest, from the simplest to the 
most complex phenomena. He at first observed 
the development of psychical life in a more 

1 The Principles of Psychology, Yol. I., pp. 1, 2, and 
especially 3 ; General Synthesis. London : Williams & 
Norgate. 



The Theory of the Moral End. 195 

general and objective aspect, but now he under- 
takes to consider the various phases of psychi- 
cal development as they are manifested in the 
world of consciousness. Although there is not, 
in Herbert Spencer's opinion, a real interval 
between physical and mental life, he says that 
" the two great classes of vital phenomena 
which physiology and psychology respectively 
embrace are broadly distinguished in this: that 
while the the one class includes both simul- 
taneous and successive changes, the other in- 
cludes successive changes only. While the 
phenomena forming the subject-matter of phys- 
iology exhibit themselves in an immense num- 
ber of different series bound up together, those 
forming the subject-matter of psychology ex- 
hibit themselves as but a single series." But 
he further says that " the vital actions which 
are the object of psychology, though they are 
distinguished from all others by their tendency 
to take the form of a simple series, never 
attain this form in an absolute manner ;" so 
that in the first manifestation of psychical life, 
as, for instance, among mollusca, the vital phe- 



198 Ethics of Positivism. 

nomena are rather simultaneous and dispersed ; 
and it is only in the decrease of the simulta- 
neous form in proportion to the coordination 
of various successive impressions in organic cent- 
ers, which gradually become perfect, that the 
characteristic condition of intelligence is found. 
The law of intelligence, as the law of all the 
earlier manifestations of life, is a harmony of 
internal with external relations — an accord be- 
tween mind and nature. To quote his own 
words : " The law of intelligence, therefore, is 
that the strength of the tendency which the 
antecedent of any psychical change has, to be 
followed by its consequent, is proportionate to 
the persistency of the union between the ex- 
ternal tilings they symbolize." Then, thought 
reflects the varied and infinite multiplicity of 
its objective relations according to the more 
or less constant and necessary harmony of 
external phenomena. Intelligence is thus ex- 
amined in the successive phases of its develop- 
ment; from reflex action it ascends insensibly to 
instinct^ from which it diverges into cognitive 



The Theory of the Moral End. 197 

manifestations — memory and reason — and into 
affective powers — sentiment and will. 

At this point, more than anywhere else in 
his exposition, the natural method of Spencer 
contrasts sharply with speculative psychology. 
The passage from reflex action to instinct and 
to reason, from its lowest degree to the high- 
est, cannot be explained at all by the doctrine 
of innate dispositions and forms of thought, but 
by the successive aggregation of sensitive ele- 
ments in experience. The sensations that we 
experience in the contemplation of a beautiful 
landscape imply, also, the minor groups of 
the internal states that have been produced in 
the country rambles of our younger days ; they 
are, as it were, the echo of the sensations 
which man experienced in former times ; prob- 
ably they are the modified combinations of 
states that were organized in the race during 
its barbarous life in fields and woods. Hence, 
Spencer repudiates the theories of both Locke 
and Kant, and gives the latter a physiological 
significance. There goes on in the nervous 
system a gradual accumulation of sensitive 



198 Ethics of Positivism. 

modifications which, being organized and trans- 
mitted by the law of heredity, become the 
material element of sentiments and of every 
complex idea. 1 

The facts of intelligence are thus referred to 
association. If life is but the continued multipli- 
cation of relations and differentiations, the mind 
must reflect in itself, as in a central light, the 
infinite rays converging to it from nature ; and 
even the most refined features of spiritual life 
must result from the aggregations of numerous 
elementary facts around various centers. This 
is true to a great extent, and Spencer proves it 
in his beautiful analysis of love. It appears, 
therefore, that the mechanical doctrine, modi- 
fied by the idea of progress, is implied in the 
views of this English philosopher. He regards 
mind as the most essential and central part of 
the system of things which Ave call Universe, 
and by a bold synthesis he seems to show the 
conjunctions and the component parts of mind 

1 The Principles of Psycholoqy, Sec. Ed., Vol. I, Part 
IY, Special Synthesis, chap. v. For what follows see 
first edition. 



The Theory of the Moral End. 199 

and how those parts are adapted to each other. 

The organism of his method is so complete 
that in pursuing it Spencer gives what we would 
call a mathematical proof of his doctrine. In 
the General and Special Synthesis, which fills 
nearly the whole of the first volume of his Prin- 
ciples of Psychology, he follows the principle 
of development from the lowest to the highest 
forms of psychical life ; and in the Analysis, 
following an opposite course, he resolves the 
most complex phenomena of the world of 
thought into cases of one and the same law, 
consisting of two fundamental processes — ver- 
ification and differentiation — the collection of 
analogies and contrasts ; one is implied in the 
assimilation of impressions and the other in 
their dissimilation. These processes Spencer 
discovers by analyzing the various degrees of 
intellectual action, from the most complex forms 
of reasoning, through all the intermediate phases 
of intelligence, down to perception. He solves 
one by one the elements of our knowledge, and 
after analyzing the most complicated percep- 
tions he passes, from the analysis of the percep- 



200 Ethics of Positivism. 

tion of the properties of extended objects, to 
the analysis of the perception of space and 
time, which are, respectively, the receptacle and 
the condition of those objects, and leads us 
finally to the simplest data of experience, to 
the ultimate material element of external per- 
ception — resistance. 

This point marks the ne plus ultra of Spen- 
cer's inquiry into the phenomena of the spir- 
itual world. The primary element of percep- 
tion consists in seizing the relations of sensa- 
tions and of internal states. Perception, there- 
fore, is traced backward in its evolution until 
the ultimate end of it is found to be hidden in 
a mysterious extremity remote from mind, into 
which the light of consciousness barely pene- 
trates, and this mystery, this impenetrable region, 
Spencer, like Bain, acknowledges to involve the 
transition from one order of phenomena to the 
other. But the process of internal modifications 
does not by itself initiate thought. Modifica- 
tions would take place in us as disintegrated 
units, or would disappear like images from a 
mirror, without leaving any impression, if mind 



The Theory of the Moral End. 201 

did not seize in our states of consciousness re- 
semblances and differences so as to classify con- 
sequents and antecedents and integrate them 
into each other. The alternation of the similar 
and the dissimilar is therefore the essential con- 
dition of life and of progress in the world of 
thought, as it is in nature, and this condition, 
besides being traceable in the most refined 
forms of mental development, is also found to 
be the same in bodily life, in which the salutary 
balance of organic life consists in the modifi- 
cation of every tissue by the action of oxygen, 
and in every tissue integrating the nutritive 
elements of the blood. 

Such is in outline the psychology of Herbert 
Spencer. The idea that rules it is that of a 
harmony of things which extends by degrees 
from one form of life to another and culminates 
in mind. It is not an original idea, but it 
acquires particular aspects when thus treated 
according to the Positive method ; and in the 
intermediate path which Spencer pursues, be- 
tween popular empiricism and a priori specu- 
lations, the conception _ of an evolutionary pro- 



202 Ethics of Positivism. 

cess certainly assumes an original character. 
Spencer has been led into this course by his 
closely inductive genius. He is opposed to 
too abstract generalizations, and likes general- 
izations to imply carefully observed facts ; but 
by a bold synthesis he surpasses all that his 
predecessors have achieved by analysis only. 
This equilibrium of faculties makes Spencer 
worthy of being considered in more aspects 
than one. He marks in the history of psycho- 
logical inquiry the latest stage that the induc- 
tive method has attained in England by the 
work of a powerful mind impressed with the 
refinements of modern science ; and this is not 
less true although some traits, and particularly 
a certain metaphysical touch in the works of 
this most distinguished philosopher, remind us 
of Schelling and Hegel. The tendency of the 
method of the English school, as it is applied 
by Spencer, seems to become ever more dis- 
tinct from the general tendency of psycho- 
logical studies on the Continent, and marks 
in him the climax of the course of thought 
exhibited, in successive phases, by James Mill, 



The Theomj of the Moral End. 203 

John S. Mill, and Alexander Bain. It is a 
movement of thought implying the tendency 
to find the basis of mental science in the 
knowledge of concrete facts, and the progress 
of that tendency we can estimate by the 
successive advances made in psychological an- 
alysis by Hartley, James Mill, Bain and 
Spencer. The inquiry into the facts of the 
world of consciousness, as we have indicated, 
had no definiteness in the vague mechanism of 
Hartley and James Mill; it was more logical 
in John Stuart Mill, more minute in Bain, 
and is to-day broader and more comprehensive 
in Spencer, who is the one so far that has 
brought the theory of the reduction of psycho- 
logical facts to the finest point. But with 
respect to the substance of method and details 
of analysis he has, in common with Mill and 
Bain — in fact with all the school — that which 
constitutes the organism of English psychology 
and gives it a physiognomy of its own in con- 
temporary history. 



204 



Ethics of Positivism. 



XII. 

The organism of English psychology is like 
the organism of a science which deals with the 
facts of consciousness as subjective phenomena, 
and human acts and languages as objective 
facts, excluding from its province all questions 
of causes, of subjects and of forces as questions 
essentially of philosophy. More careful, or 
perhaps bolder than the Scotch school, which 
admitted original differences between internal 
facts, Positive psychology bases its analyses on 
sensation, regarding it as a primary and irre- 
ducible fact ; and on association, as one of the 
most general laws of the phenomena of the 
mind. Actual sensations or groups of sensa- 
tions, ideas reproduced and associated in judg- 
ments, in universal propositions and in general 
reasonings are, according to the teachers of 
this school, the material and form of an un- 
broken series extending through the world of 
consciousness, from one first modification of an 
internal state to the highest operations of the 
mind, to science and history. It can hardly 



The Theory of the Moral End. 205 

be said, therefore, that experimental psychol- 
ogy as we see it progress in England implies 
merely a certain direction of the Positive 
method. The scope of that science is beyond 
the limits of observation and analysis, as it sets 
out with one fact to which it reduces all oth- 
ers which we know by immediate experience 
to be distinct from that one fact which the 
new psychology takes up as fundamental; and 
while it repudiates further problems on the 
nature of phenomena, gives its opinion on the 
most highly involved question of psychology in 
enunciating that all internal facts are identical 
to sensation. This is further proof of what we 
have before noticed respecting Positive psychol- 
ogy. It contradicts the urgent need of science 
in rejecting speculations, but sooner or later 
it is obliged to deal with the very problems 
which it excludes from its principles. 

XIII. 

We have endeavored to give an outline of 
the method of English psychology, not so much 
with a view to present it as a method, as to 



206 Ethics of Positivism. 

trace through its unbroken tradition the general 
features of the analyses by which that method 
has been gradually applied to moral questions. 
We are not aware that Utilitarianism has been 
criticised in this way before. Not even in 
England has the subject been dealt with from 
this standpoint. All, or nearly all, the crit- 
icism of English writers on Utilitarianism, in- 
cluding the latest by Grote, imply simply an 
examination of the ethical and metaphysical 
aspect of the Utilitarian theory. It is an ob- 
vious rule of logic that a theory which is even 
partially new should be subjected to a new 
mode of criticism. It is true that Utilitarian- 
ism, as taught by Mill, is at bottom old ; but 
it assumes a new aspect as the theory of asso- 
ciation is so developed as to form a new basis 
for it, and turns the analysis of disinterested 
acts and of moral ideas into a question of fact. 
In order to judge the Utilitarian doctrine thus 
modified, it is necessary, therefore, to assume 
the very standpoint of its best expounders, 
and find out how far the rigorous principles 



The Theory of the Moral End. 207 

of the experimental method are consistent with 
the theory of the reduction of internal facts. 

Only three of the principal writers on ex- 
perimental English psychology have applied ex 
professo the method of reduction to the doc- 
trine of the moral end. James Mill applied 
that method in his Analysis of the Phenomena 
of the Human Mind ; Alexander Bain, in his 
works, The Emotions and the Will, and in 
Mental and Moral Science ; John S. Mill 
applied reduction in the fourth chapter of his 
Essay on Utilitarianism, now contained in 
the third volume of Dissertations and Dis- 
cussions. These writers substantially agree in 
recognizing moral ideas and disinterested sen- 
timents, and on reducing them to the utilitarian 
and sympathetic tendencies of human nature. 
Each of them has, however, his distinctive trait 
according as he recognizes a more or less im- 
portant part which those tendencies play in 
the complicated phenomena of human conduct, 
and according as he derives the idea of right 
from the more or less direct influence of posi- 
tive law on consciousness. "We will consider 



208 Ethics of Positivism. 

especially John Stuart Mill, who first treated 
the subject with acumen and originality, not 
forgetting that psychological analysis is the 
hinge of his Utilitarianism. 

The first point which Mill endeavors to 
explain is : of what sort of proof the principle 
of utility is susceptible. He says that, like all 
the principles and first premises of our knowl- 
edge, the first principles of human conduct 
are incapable of proof. Both classes of prin- 
ciples may be the subject of a direct appeal to 
our internal consciousness. Whatever question 
may be raised on the end of life it must be 
a question of what is desirable. To quote his 
own words : " Questions about ends are, in other 
words, questions of what things are desirable." 
According to him, happiness, nothing but hap- 
piness, is desirable as an end ; other things 
may be desirable, but only as means to that 
end. Now, what shows that we should de- 
sire happiness ? It is shown by one simple 
argument — the fact that we all desire it. 

But Mill saw very well that such an ar- 
gument was not conclusive. Happiness is 



The Theory of the Moral End, 209 

one of the ends to which oar conduct tends ; 
bat it is not the sole end of life. Besides many 
other things, man desires virtue, to which he 
sometimes aspires with open and generous in- 
tentions, regardless of other seemingly greater 
benefits that would accrue to him from a dif- 
ferent course of conduct ; and often he aspires 
to it at the risk of what he possesses and even 
at the risk of his life. A Utilitarian of fifty 
years ago would have denied such an instance, 
but Mill does not ; nay, he accepts it and tries 
to explain it by the theory of association. What- 
ever may be the opinion of a Utilitarian on 
the original and primary conditions by which 
virtue is made virtue, he not only recog- 
nizes and admits that it is possible that virtue 
may be desirable as a good in itself, irrespective 
of any other end beyond it, but he goes further, 
and finds the real factors of general utility 
and happiness in this very absolute and disin- 
terested love of virtue. Kor does he think that 
he thus departs from the principle of Utili- 
tarianism. The desire of an end gradually 
changes, by the law of association, so that 



210 Ethics of Positivism. 

the means to that end are subsequently de- 
sired, sometimes even independently of the 
end. Now, if happiness is the end desirable, 
and happiness includes virtue as one of its 
many and varied factors, it follows that the 
desire of happiness implies virtue as one of 
its elements. Virtue is not originally and 
naturally part of the end; it becomes so by 
being transformed into a means to attain to 
virtue; and, even if it seems to be desirable as 
an end itself, it is desired either because it is 
pleasant to be conscious of our own virtue, or 
because it is painful to feel that we are without 
it, or for both reasons at once. If this fact is 
psychologically true, if human nature originally 
desires nothing beyond happiness and pleasure, 
it follows that happiness and pleasure must be 
the only desirable things, the only end of our 
actions, the criterion of morality. 1 

Mill thus reasons in a circle, and recurs to 
the testimony of consciousness for an evidence 
of his assertion. He says : " Self-conscious- 



1 Utilitarianism, chap, iv, by J. S. Mill. 



The Theory of the Moral End. 211 

ness. . . .impartially consulted, will declare that 
desiring a thing and finding it pleasant, aver- 
sion to it and thinking of it as painful, are 
phenomena entirely inseparable, or, rather, two 
parts of the same. . . .psychological fact ;. . . . 
that to desire anything, except in proportion as 
the idea of it is pleasant, is a physical and 
metaphysical impossibility." 

No one can contradict, in Mill's opinion, 
this fact ; " and the objection made will be, not 
that desire can possibly be directed to anything 
ultimately except pleasure and exemption from 
pain, but that the will is a different thing from 
desire." The English philosopher has so far 
dealt mainly with desire, and not with will. 
He describes the unconscious inclination of 
man to happiness like the flowing of a tranquil 
stream on a beautiful Spring day. He does not 
point to the strong and conscious rising of the 
moral sentiment in man against the tempest of 
instincts and senses. Now, the will is not iden- 
tical with desire ; the one is distinguished from 
the other in that the pleasure of the thing de- 
sired is not always implied in the sound deter- 



212 Ethics of Positivism.* 

mination of the virtuous, who often persists in 
following what he considers the right path in 
spite of much pain which he may experience in 
pursuing it ; whereas he would certainty avoid 
the path in the pursuit of which he finds pain, 
if his motives were at bottom so selfish as the 
Utilitarian doctrine claims to show. Will, the 
active phenomenon, is a different thing from 
desire, the state of passive sensibility, and 
though originally an offshoot from it, may in 
time take root and detach itself from the parent 
stock ; so much so, that in the case of an hab- 
itual purpose, instead of willing the thing be- 
cause we desire it, we often desire it because 
we will. 

This is the point in his analysis where Mill 
attempts reduction. The fact of volition is so 
manifest in ourselves that it can be recognized 
among a myriad of other facts, because no 
sooner does it originate than we realize in it 
the guidance of an immutable idea. It is a 
fact no element of which can be denied with- 
out denying all the elements involved in it ; 
and when it is fully developed in conscious- 



The Theory of the Moral End. 213 

ness it is in contradiction, as Mill himself al- 
leges, to all the sympathies and inclinations 
arising from the senses. Mill, however, regards 
that fact only as the last link of a long chain 
of internal facts the ends of which, although 
apparently diverging into opposite directions, 
become unconsciously, and by occult ways, re- 
united in the mind. They become separated 
by habit and united again by association. Many 
indifferent things which men originally did 
from some motive they continue to do from 
habit. Sometimes this is done unconsciously, 
- the consciousness coming only after the action ; 
at other times with conscious volition which has 
become habitual and is put in operation by the 
force of habit, in opposition perhaps to de- 
liberate preference, as often happens with those 
who have contracted habits of vicious or hurt- 
ful indulgence. ... and last comes the case in 
which the habitual act of will in the individual 
instance is not in contradiction to the general 
intention prevailing at other times, but is in ful- 
filment of it ; as in the case of a person of 
confirmed virtue and of all who deliberately 



214 Ethics of Positivism, 

and consistently pursue a determinate end. The 
distinction between will and desire, thus un- 
derstood, is an authentic and highly important 
psychological fact.... It is not less true that 
will, in the beginning, is entirely produced by 
desire. . . .He further says that " him in whom 
virtuous will is still feeble, conquerable by tempt- 
ation, and not fully to be relied on," can be 
strengthened " only by making the person desire 
virtue. . . .by associating the doing right with 
pleasure, or the doing wrong with pain." Mill 
concludes that : iC Will is the child of desire, and 
passes out of the dominion of its parent only 
to come under that of habit. That which is 
the result of habit affords no presumption of 
being intrinsically good. . . .Both in feeling and 
conduct, habit is the only thing which imparts 
certainty, .... this state of the will is a means 
to good, not intrinsically good." 1 

What is the result of Mill's reduction ? 
Like all contemporaneous psychologists, he fully 
recognizes the fact of the existence of moral 

1 Utilitarianism , chapter iv, by J. S. Mill. 



The Theory of the Moral End. 215 

ideas ; but while he conceives, in the will of the 
adult, elements altogether new and distinct 
from those of the desire whicli initiated that 
will, Mill regards both will and desire as one 
and the same fact, the material of which is 
the instinctive tendency to pleasure, and the 
form association. In this is really the common 
trait of the mental analysis of English psy- 
chologists. All the doctrines of the English 
school of psychology suppose two very distinct 
things : the study of facts as facts, and their 
reduction^ or explanation^ by means of other 
facts. These are conditions of truly scientific 
efficacy in two cases only : (1) The study of 
the fact must be complete ; (2) a law taken 
as an instrument of reduction must have in- 
trinsically the value of a law, and must explain 
facts and all that is implied in them. Now, in 
our exposition of the views of English psy- 
chologists we see that they suppose feeling, and 
the active and passive manifestations thereof, 
to be the sole and irreducible fact of conscious- 
ness and consider association as the only con- 



216 Ethics of Positivism. 

dition under which the higher facts of the mind 
differ from those of sensation and spontaneity ; 
hence, as the only efficacious means by which 
the former can be reduced to the latter, and 
by which the former can be explained by the 
latter. It is of some use to briefly examine 
whether such a way of putting and treating 
the great question of the differences of psy- 
chological facts is truly consistent with the 
principles of the experimental method; or 
whether, even granting that the doctrine of 
faculties, as it is admitted now-a-days, is im- 
perfect in various ways, the new theory of 
association implies an efficacious instrument 
of reduction, as Mill and his school seem to 
believe. We shall thus finally decide whether 
the analyses which they base on that theory 
are to be accepted. We believe that in 
confining ourselves to the experimental method, 
w T e are following the right course of a rigor- 
ous criticism of the doctrines of Positive psy- 
chology. 



The Theory of the Moral End. 217 



XIY. 

It may be well to remind the reader that 
we do not, in any way, accept as data for our 
examination the idea of natural or psychical 
forces supposed to exist in themselves, inde- 
pendently of facts ; nor do we accept the idea 
of powers or faculties as things distinct from 
the subject and from the acts resulting there- 
from. What we think of such ideas we have 
expressed in the first part of this work, together 
with an opinion of their experimental evidence 
and of the conclusions to which Positive psy- 
chologists came in consequence of their rejection 
of them. Now, we propose to point out that 
the question whether force or forces exist or 
not, whether they are reducible to material con- 
ditions or not, is not identical with the question 
whether all phenomena of matter and of con- 
sciousness are not reducible to but one phenome- 
non, or to a single order of phenomena. The 
former question, properly understood, has been 
since the time of Leibintz a question of meta- 
physics in the strict sense of the term ; and both 



218 Ethics of Positivism,. 

the dynamists and materialists, who solve it dif- 
ferently, cannot, strictly speaking, escape being 
called metaphysicians. The latter is simply a 
question of experiment on the circumstances 
and the elements of a fact, circumstances and 
elements which we, both objectively and subject- 
ively, observe to be in phenomena themselves; 
and reasoning out their differences we conclude 
that it is either absolutely or negatively possible 
to reduce and convert those phenomena between 
themselves, of course not forgetting, while we 
make inferences, the actual state of scientific 
knowledge. Those circumstances and elements 
must, before all, be clearly defined in order 
that we may establish the test by which we are 
to determine whether the differences observed 
in facts are reducible or not. 

Any change in nature implies two quite 
distinct conditions. One is the separation of 
the component parts of bodies and the motion 
of those parts from one point in space to an- 
other. This is what we would call the material 
and mechanical condition. The other, which 
we would call the formal condition, is not 



The Theory of the Moral End. 219 

always manifest to the senses, and involves the 
action underlying the motions of the parts of 
a body. Any fact, however insignificant, in- 
volves the two different modes of being. On 
one hand, a continuous change of forms, hues 
and motions; on the other, so met hing recently 
working under the appearance of extension, 
something simple which eludes our most subtle 
investigations ; a mysterious motion underlying 
a manifest change. Even the most recent theo- 
ries which, with the idea of force, repudiate 
distinct principles of action in physical facts, 
refer these facts to the operations of a medium 
inaccessible to our senses, to the vibrations of 
an imponderable fluid. Now, while we consider 
phenomena under the former condition, under 
their material or mechanical condition, their 
mode of existence is ever the same. The end- 
less variety of forms under which we contem- 
plate phenomena implies the subtle processes 
of aggregation and disaggregation. Each form 
or motion is a more and a less in time and 
space. It would seem, therefore, that the only 
method by which we can distinguish phenomena 



220 Ethics of Positivism, 

is quantitative. This quantitative criterion, 
however, would not be on the basis of the con- 
stant immutable relations of facts. It is simply 
the vanishing shadow in our mind of the laws of 
facts; that which made the Pythagorians con- 
ceive of their doctrine of number, and led De- 
mocritus to speak of love and hatred. Science 
is not content with a cognition of the sensible 
amount of things, their external and superficial 
relations ; it endeavors to penetrate deeper and 
find out the how of those relations. It not only 
investigates material existences, but the mode 
and the form of their occurrence in time and 
space. The visible analogy or difference be- 
tween the attraction of two molecules and of 
two heavenly bodies; between the repulsion 
of two chemical subtances and of two electrici- 
ties of the same pole — is for the scientist a 
suggestion to look into those facts for the like 
or unlike modes of action of physical forces. 
These modes of action and the possibility of 
reducing them to a universal phenomenon of 
matter constitute the great problem in modern 
physics. 



The Theory of the Moral End. 221 

It is a fact that the investigation of the unity 
of the phenomena of physical forces would not 
be as productive of scientific results if we 
should investigate the material instead of the 
formal conditions of phenomena. It is one 
and the same problem, growing more difficult 
of solution as we proceed in our study of na- 
ture from the simpler to the more complicated 
phases of development. From the external 
properties of objects under which the opera- 
tions of molecular and gravitative forces se- 
cretly progress we pass to the study of another 
operation, no less intrinsic or varied than the 
former, in the organic functions of the vegeta- 
ble and animal orders. In both these stages 
of growth we find the same mechanical process 
of aggregation and disaggregation, the same 
visible transformation ; a seemingly aimless 
transmutation of matter under which are hid- 
den irreducible formal differences. We say 
that they are irreducible formal differences 
on scientific authority. Father Secchi, a very 
able supporter of the theory of the unity of 
natural phenomena as enunciated by Grove, 



222 Ethics of Positivism. 

and, what is still more noteworthy of him in 
our case, an opponent of dynamism, declares, 
in Book IV of his Unita delle Forze Fisiche, 
where he extends the application of the theory 
of vibrations to molecular and chemical forces 
and to gravitation, that not one of the facts of 
organism can be explained solely by the laws 
of inorganic matter. " As to their material 
functions, chemical re-actions and emotions," 
he says, " organic beings are equally under the 
sway of physical forces ; but this element of 
activity, though one of the most important, is 
not the sole element in them. It is necessary 
to take into account a special action implied 
obviously in a certain molecular disposition 
which, once established, allows this action to 
continue until the materials fit for the perform- 
ance of life are no longer wanting, and that 
disposition is preserved intact.*' He further 
says " chemical action in plants, under the in- 
fluence of light and heat, can be imitated by 
art in our laboratories, and in both cases the 
results attained are similar; what we cannot 
reproduce is the mode of action" 



The Theory of the Moral End. 223 

Now, whether we consider such modes of 
action by themselves as fo?*mal conditions of 
facts, or as facts in themse] ves ; whether we 
attribute them to originally distinct forces, or in 
any way we may feel disposed to consider them — 
we must admit that they are what makes it more 
difficult for the philosopher to reduce things 
as he proceeds to investigate from the atom and 
the cell to reason and will. The analogies which 
Bain and Spencer, and, before them, Schelling, 
have sought between organism and mind • the 
doctrine which * discovers time in sensation and 
thought, together with the other doctrines of 
nervous waves and of hereditary transmission — 
whatever truth there may be in them, we may 
safely assert, have so far proved futile efforts 
to establish an identity between matter and con- 
sciousness, between the vibration of a nerve 
and an idea, or between the contraction of a 
muscle and moral deliberation. We do not 
believe that any experimentalist, whether he 
admits or not forces distinct from matter, can 
conscientiously say that the greatest apprecia- 
ble difference in the facts of physical forces 



224 Ethics of Positivism. 

is equal to or less than the difference between 
an impression and a state of consciousness, be- 
tween a feeling and an idea, between an idea 
and a voluntary act ; or, whether the differ- 
ences revealed to interior and exterior obser- 
vation are, at least in this case, rather intrinsic 
differences in the mode of operation of one 
or more causes. These are the differences 
which he may vainly endeavor to obviate by 
recurring to the usual analogies between the 
brains and thought. We say usual because 
if we ponder over the claims urged in behalf 
of the theory which identifies psychical with 
organic and material facts, we see that there 
is nothing in them but a mere hypothesis sup- 
posing, from certain explained modes of opera- 
tion in matter, the possibility of other unex- 
plained modes of action by which life, feeling 
and mind are produced. While they do not 
explain any other modes of operation, neither 
the empiricist nor the materialist can claim 
to make one thing out of the many phenom- 
ena which appear to be the results of essentially 
different principles of activity ; the differences 



The Theory of the Moral End. 225 

of those phenomena must therefore be recog- 
nized as formal and not as material differ- 
ences, hence as irreducible. 

Those who distinguish mental from physio- 
logical facts, and reduce both classes of phe- 
nomena to one common source, seem to obviate, 
at least in part, the abstruse points to which 
we have just referred. They regard psychical 
association by itself as something distinct from 
molecular aggregation and chemical affinity, 
and they only recognize in it the common con- 
dition of internal facts, referring their differ- 
ences to more or less elements of sensibility 
superposed on each other. It is true that al- 
though in this case the distinction between 
mind and body is still recognized, the intervals 
which philosophy at one time conceived be- 
tween the faculties no longer remains, and the 
characters which analysis finds in them are no 
longer formal, but material conditions of sin- 
gle facts. At this point, however, there may 
be a fallacy which it is important to discover. 
In the development of consciousness, from the 
earliest modifications of sense to thought, there 



226 Ethics of Positivism. 

are unbroken series of changes implying two 
very different but correlative conditions, such 
as we determine in the phenomena of matter 
and organism. One of these we would call 
quantitative and mechanical, namely, the pro- 
cess of connection between the antecedents and 
consequents of those series, and between the 
series themselves as unity of composition in 
virtue of the unity of the mind with nature. 
The other we would call quantitative or dy- 
namic — that is, the distinction of any new ele- 
ment in each series ; a new mode of psychical 
action almost like the diminuendo of voices on 
one note. There are intervals between the 
two series corresponding to the links in each 
series, but the former involve much more pro- 
found differences than the latter, so that the 
the difference between the simplest and the 
most complex of the facts of sensibility is not 
comparable with the difference between the 
least general idea and the most complicated 
sensation. In fact, Bain and Spencer reduce 
sensations of distance and of form to those of 
touch and motion by an analysis of the homo- 



The Theory of the Moral End. 227 

geneous elements which constitute those sen- 
sations; but it is not so easy for them to 
reduce intelligence to sense. In order to main- 
tain his theory of development, Spencer has 
recourse to remote analogies and to hypothe- 
ses; while Bain admits that with the manifest- 
ation of intellect there is called into activity 
a new energy of the mind, a new act super- 
posed upon feeling. In a note to James Mill's 
Analysis, Bain says : " We may add to the 
mere fact of pleasure the cognition of the state 
as a state of pleasure, and as belonging to us 
at the time. This is not the same thing as 
before. It is something new superposed upon 
the previous consciousness." He further speaks 
of the division of mental energies. 

These bold psychologists have not noticed 
that in reducing materially the different series 
of facts to one law of composition those series 
are not reduced to one and the same mode 
of psychical action ; nor did they see that, 
while to explain the transition from a simple 
to a more complex sensation is enough to show 
how like elements are gathered therein under 



228 Ethics of Positivism. 

one and the same form of feeling, it is neces- 
sary to show how the psychical activities, form- 
ally distinct^ are manifested in conformity to 
one and the same mechanical law of association, 
to explain the unfolding of ideas from sensa- 
tions, of will from appetite. 

Such is the result of an erroneous application 
of method. The connection of various modes 
of action in nature under one order of external 
and mechanical conditions requires a different 
course of treatment from that pursued by the 
experimentalists for various forms of facts. The 
sensible universe, which Galileo called the 
Book of God, speaks to us, under its material 
form, in as many languages as there are grades 
of things, from the molecule to organism. The 
grammatical rules of these tongues are implied 
in mechanics, in chemistry and in biology ; but 
the more general laws of these various branches 
of science are equally traceable in the world 
of thought and of experience. The general 
distinctive traits of the several sciences are in 
the particular methods and in the proper ap- 
plication of method in the inquiry of single 



The Theory of the Moral End. 229 

mechanical, chemical or animal causes. The 
same necessity of adopting particular methods 
in the inquiry of particular causes is still more 
forcibly realized in the investigations of the 
phenomena of the inner world, which, as the 
culmination of one universal system, involves 
all the modes of operation under one form sui 
generis: namely, unconsciousness. 1 

Association is, then, the form of the mechan- 
ical process, both in nature and in the world of 
thought; and although association, as a most 
general condition of psychological facts, affords 
an explanation of the material differences and 
represents the quantitative or serial unity of 
those facts, we cannot equally reduce on the 
basis of association their formal and qualita- 
tive differences. In the sixth book of his Logic, 
Mill says that the laws of mental facts are some- 

1 See Prof. Siciliani's Revival of Italian Positive Philoso- 
phy. There are in this work some fine observations 
on the irreducibility of psychical functions and on the 
English doctrines : Chapters " Organism and Psycho- 
logical Process," and "Genesis and Psychological Tele- 
ology." 



230 Ethics of Positivism, 

times analogous to mechanical and sometimes 
to chemical laws. The mode which, in the 
experience of one or more impressions, calls 
up an idea, is not like the mere coalition of 
elements of experience, but is analogous to the 
law of chemical compounds in which the form 
of the composition differs from the matter or 
from the component parts. Few will deny, 
particularly after what Kant has taught, that 
in the higher ideas the elements of sensibility 
undergo a complete transformation. If it is so, 
then can we affirm, with the Positive py sonol- 
ogists, that, by the law of association — that is, 
by the association of material elements alone — 
we can adequately explain intelligence ? Can 
we admit with them that in the phenomena 
of thought there is not a new element, a new 
form of psychical force superposed upon asso- 
ciation % It is true, at any rate, that although 
the method of the English school explains, to 
a certain extent, how the elements of sensibility 
become associated in one idea, as for instance 
in the idea of distance or of form, it certainly 
does not explain why and how the form of the 



The Theomj of the Moral End. 23 1 

composition of those elements results in some- 
thing so profoundly and qualitatively different. 

It cannot be said, therefore, that those who 
have applied themselves to the inquiry of men- 
tal phenomena with a view to establish a true 
science of the mind have so far realized in as- 
sociation the universal means of scientific pro- 
cess, the principle of true doctrinal organization, 
which has apparently been their object since 
Hartley. Nor need they say, as John S. Mill 
has written in Auguste Comte and Positivism, 
that " that which the law of gravitation is to 
astronomy, that which the elementary proper- 
ties of the tissues are to physiology, the law 
of the association of ideas is to psychology." 
The law of gravitation is valuable as an instru- 
ment of reduction in our inquiries into the phe- 
nomena of the heavens, because the fact upon 
which that law rests represents just the form 
under which we contemplate all the phenom- 
ena which it explains, although there are ma- 
terial distinctions in their dynamical being. 
The law of association has not, as we have seen, 
the same value in psychology, and to accept it, 



232 Ethics of Positivism. 

as some of the leading philosophers of England 
do, as the foundation of the science of the 
whole subject of mind, is to run the risk of 
drifting, in this nineteenth century of ours, to- 
ward the false idea of unity implied in the 
conception of a scheme of the universe ; a theory 
from which these same investigators have de- 
parted, and still endeavor to depart, pursuing the 
safe Positive method. The importance of the 
principle of association in psychology should be, 
and has generally been, recognized in philoso- 
phy ; and although a series of English psychol- 
ogists have, since Hume, made a broader study 
of it by close and ingenious observations, the 
tradition of the old schools implied that prin- 
ciple long before them, under the name of psy- 
chological analysis and synthesis. In fact, the 
doctrine of consciousness in the Elements of 
Galluppi is altogether founded on these two 
processes. 

XV. 

The consequences of Mill's examination are 
evident in the doctrine of the good. Mill, like 



The Theory of the Moral End. 233 

Bain, explains by the law of association the 
absolutely disinterested, motive which actuates 
the virtuous ; he consequently says that any 
one originally desires virtue because it is as- 
sociated in his mind with pleasure and with 
the reward which he derives from it ; but in 
time he aspires to it without any selfish motive, 
without thinking of the benefits that may accrue 
to him from a virtuous life ; in fact, he grows 
to wish for it even mindless of the pains which, 
under some circumstances, he may experience 
in following the path of virtue. Man at first 
considers the means in relation to the end, and 
he afterward looks upon those very means as 
the ends of his actions. Yirtue is at first de- 
sirable as a means to pleasure, to utility, to re- 
ward, and is subsequently desirable as an end 
in itself, without any thought of pleasure. It 
seems, therefore, that, according to his view, 
the sole circumstance of the change of desire 
to will in the involved subject of psychology 
is what causes the difference between the inclin- 
ation to pleasure and the disinterested motive 
to practice virtue. In this one circumstance 



234: Ethics of Positivism. 

association is involved. To that which we at 
first desire as an end we associate the hope of 
pleasure, and by the force of habit such associa- 
tion causes us to will, in time, virtue, independ- 
ently of the idea of pleasure for which we orig- 
inally desired it. The two factors of mind are, 
therefore, selfish desire on one hand and disin- 
terested volition on the other. The cause of 
the various ways in which we identify our minds 
with an end is to be found, in such a case, in 
the association in thought of our inclination to 
the personal enjoyment which we expect to real- 
ize from virtue with the volition implied in our 
pursuit of it. If we desire virtue for the per- 
sonal benefits which we may derive from it, we 
may reasonably suppose that we have not, mor- 
ally speaking, the will to follow it ; for. even 
if we desire virtue disinterestedly, it is only 
because the habitual association in thought of 
the idea of virtue with that of a reward causes 
us to dwell on the former idea without con- 
scientiously looking to the latter. These phil- 
osophers fail to notice that, although they ex- 
plain in this way, to a certain extent, the con- 



The Theory of the Moral End. 235 

stancy of volition, in opposition to the variable 
character of desire, they do not explain how 
the mind apprehends in those two forms two pro- 
foundly different principles of activity. Mill's 
theory seems to take us only half-way. It 
is not enough to affirm that the ideal of good 
is a free purpose which has become necessary, 
and that we seek pleasure sometimes simply 
by force of habit, and not because pleasure has 
any real attraction for us. It remains yet to 
be proved that such is the case in the question 
of virtue, and how it happens that the very 
instinctive inclination which, under the law of 
self-love, avoids pain, becomes by the mysterious 
force of habit a contempt for any pleasures and 
pains in view of a far-off end, while we feel 
desire, affection and passion impelling us to 
conquer the force of conscience while we are 
in a state of mental conflict. 

Laying too much stress on the fine analo- 
gies discernible in facts, the Positive school 
loses the sense of the important points of differ- 
ence which a broader analysis can find in 
consciousness. They confine themselves to 



236 Ethics of Positivism, 

phenomena, nothing but phenomena, and fail, 
therefore, to explain them fully ; as one who, 
following by boat the course of a river, can- 
not perceive its windings so distinctly as he 
would from the summit of a hill. There are 
appearances of mind, as there are appearances 
in external nature ; and mere appearances we 
must admit them to be while we do not pene- 
trate deeply enough to find the occult causes 
of which they are effects. In the investigation 
of natural phenomena the inferences made in 
an earlier stage must be verified by what is 
discovered in the final general observation of 
the subject under investigation. In this the 
method of psychology should not differ from 
the method of modern natural science, which, 
not recognizing any sudden revolutions in the 
w^hole cosmos, assumes the new phenomena to 
be the grounds for further investigations and 
new experimental processes. It observes care- 
fully and explains more than one cause ; but, 
being finally brought face to face with some- 
thing yet to be known, it patiently goes over 
the same ground, presuming that this something 



The Theory of the Moral End, 237 

more to be explained may be referable either 
to absolutely new causes, or to some mode of 
action which has not yet been foreseen as 
the effect of some already known causes. 

XYI. 

Ln" the fifth chapter of the work referred 
to in the preceding pages, Mill concludes on 
the basis of association his analysis of some 
phases of moral nature. In a previous chapter 
he makes a study of the psychological process 
by which feeling and will become powers in 
moral life ; and in the fifth chapter he exam- 
ines, one by one, the elements that enter in 
one supreme idea : the idea of right ; endeavor- 
ing to show that it does not contain any prin- 
ciple the explanation of which cannot be given 
on grounds of experience. Up to this stage 
his inquiry seems to have the character of an 
anatomical study of disinterested ideas and feel- 
ings ; and what follows we would call an his- 
torical study of the origin and growth of those 
feelings and ideas in the individual and in so- 



238 Ethics of Positivism. 

eiety. Mill's keen analysis of moral nature 
originated with Kant, and forms one of the 
most important features in the contemporane- 
ous system which we consider ; and we cer- 
tainly cannot deny that it proceeds on some 
sound and good points. The idea of justice, 
of law and responsibility, has always been, and 
is still, regarded by Positive psychologists as 
the culminating result of that psychological 
process by which man attains to full self-con- 
sciousness, and as the highest result of that 
process they of course look upon it as the most 
complex fact to be subjected to investigation ; 
in the same way that the most lofty alpine 
heights, to produce which many geological 
ages, revolutions of soil and climate have con- 
curred, are the most complex facts to be invest- 
igated in one of the orders of nature. The 
tendency to that climax is at first dimly mani- 
fested in the inclinations and sympathies of 
an infant ; it is more marked in the desires 
and in the first symptoms of volition in a boy, 
and, growing more decided through the various 
stages of youth, it reaches its ultimate stage 



The Theory of the Moral End. 239 

of development in the consciousness of the adult, 
who, by mature reflection, establishes an order 
of moral relations, and takes it as the guidance 
of his conduct. At this point the idea of right 
may be said to be formed ; but the question 
upon which speculators have always been di- 
vided is whether the idea of right and wrong 
is taken as the rule of our actions owing to 
social and sympathetic feelings, on account of 
education and custom, and it is also one by 
the solution of which we may finally establish 
a sound basis for the science of morals. 

John S. Mill is one of those philosophers 
who are confident of the future of mankind, on 
the ground that moral ideas grow more pow- 
erful as man advances through experience and 
education. This seems to point to some pre- 
vious remarks of his to the effect that the re- 
lations between the individual and society, his 
individual and social nature, are such as to 
identify individual with social interests ; the 
interdependence between the two becoming 
more determined as we advance in civilization; 
so that the principle of utility ultimately im- 



240 Ethics of Positivism. 

plies moral obligation. About the same thing 
can be said, according to Mill, with reference 
to the conception of justice. The conception of 
right and wrong is nothing intrinsically pecu- 
liar ; it is not a simple idea and sui generis a 
revelation of an irreducible internal fact. Mill 
says that analysis finds in it a combination of 
attributes the investigation of whose origin and 
form shows how they gather around it a com- 
plex sentim.ent by virtue of the law of associa- 
tion which he believes to have been effectually 
explained. He proceeds to analyze those at- 
tributes, and after scrutinizing such acts as we 
call just and unjust, and showing by an etymo- 
logical examination that the idea of law, imply- 
ing something ordained by law, has prevailed 
at all times in the notion of justice, he observes 
how there has always been combined with the 
idea of justice the idea of legal restraint, of 
penal sanction and of duty ; the last implying 
that it is dutiful to do whatever can justly be 
exacted from others. The idea of penalty, which 
is essential to the formation of the idea of law, 
is, then, a peculiarity by which the idea of 



The Theory of the Moral End, 241 

justice is intrinsically distinguished from the 
principle of utility ; but it is also the idea 
which underlies the notion of good and evil, 
and, like the conception of moral obligation, 
is universal. The correlative ideas of duty and 
of right are really the points which make the 
notion of justice essentially distinct from other 
ideas; and whoever does not clearly distin- 
guish the ideas of duty and of right is liable to 
confound the dictates of the sentiment of jus- 
tice with the virtues of beneficence and gen- 
erosity, and thus mistake obligations of justice 
for moral obligations. 1 

So far Mill's examination does not seem to 
be open to serious contradictions, provided we 
grant that in the process of formation of the 
supreme conception of law, which Mill him- 
self recognizes as the essence of binding force, 
the notion of penal sanction originally precedes 
the idea of absolute right upon which the law 
hinges, even in cases in which man feels remorse 
for faults beyond the reach of earthly sanction. 

1 Uiilitarianis?n, chapter v, On the Connection be- 
tween Justice and Utility. 



242 Ethics of Positivism, 

But this English economist, as usual, makes an 
attempt to analyze the idea of justice so as to 
resolve it into the various elements which he 
conceives to enter into its composition. He 
says that " the desire to punish a person who 
has done harm to an individual is a spontaneous 
outgrowth from two sentiments. . . .the impulse 
of self-defense, and the feeling of sympathy." 

It is natural to resent," he continues, " and 
to repel or retaliate, if any harm is done or at- 
tempted against ourselves, or against those with 
whom we may sympathize.". . . .Whether it be 
an instinct, or a result of intelligence, it is, we 
know, common to all animal nature ; for every 
animal tries to revenge itself on those who have 
hurt itself or its young. Human beings, on this 
point, only differ from other animals in two par- 
ticulars : first, in being capable of sympathizing, 
not solely with their offspring, 01% like some 
of the more noble animals, with some superior 
animal who is kind to them, but with all hu- 
man, and even all sentient, beings ; secondly, 
in having a more developed intelligence, which 
gives a wider range to the whole of their sent- 



The Theory of the Moral End. 243 

iments, whether self-regarding or sympathetic. 
By virtue of his superior intelligence, even 
apart from his superior range of sympathy, 
a human being is capable of apprehending a 
community of interest between himself and the 
human society of which he forms a part, so 
that any conduct which threatens the security 
of the society generally is threatening to his 
own, and calls forth his instinct — if instinct it 
be — of self-defense. The same superiority of 
intelligence, joined to the power of sympathiz- 
ing with human beings generally, enables him 
to attach himself to the collective idea of his 
tribe, his country, or mankind, in such a man- 
ner that any act hurtful to them raises his in- 
stinct of sympathy, and urges him to resist- 
ance. 1 

The origin of the idea of the Just, which 
has at all times a bearing on the misfortunes 
and crimes of mankind, is thus explained by 
Mill as the result of a kind of moral mechan- 
ism in which the individual and society are 

1 Utilitarianism, chapter v, On the Connection be- 
tween Justice and Utility. 



244 Ethics of Positivism. 

the motive-power to selfish or sympathetic in- 
stincts, under the regulating influence of in- 
telligence. ~We shall not refute his doctrine, 
simply because it appeals to the affective ele- 
ments and impulses of man. As the poet says, 
all is sacred in nature, and the work in which 
human faculties actively share cannot have 
either a hierarchy or means except in relation 
to an end ; this end, and the form which 
it assumes in moral consciousness, are, how- 
ever, the points in question in the domain of 
ethics. 

In a previous chapter we have noticed how 
Mill endeavors to explain the subjective origin 
of morality in the binding force of inward life 
without apprehending the law of that force. 
Our criticism on that point of his moral phil- 
osophy applies also to the present instance, 
in which he claims to find in intelligence the 
objective basis of moral sanction in general. 
But, as he previously denied the origin of ra- 
tional obligation in consciousness, so he here 
refutes the claim of intelligence to hold abso- 
lute sway over the phenomena of moral life, 



The Theory of the Moral End. 245 

To say the least. Mill is evidently in an in- 
soluble dilemma. He either admits that the 
claim of obligation lies solely in the connection 
between the sympathetic and selfish feelings, 
in which case the superior intelligence, which 
he attributes to man as the judge of his relation 
to his fellow-creatures, plays an accessory and 
useless part in the moral world, or he recog- 
nizes intelligence as a regulating inner power; 
in which case, we wonder how we are to ex- 
plain the source of the absolute necessity of 
good and of respect therein implied ; a necessity 
which we cannot draw from self-regarding or 
sympathetic feelings. Of this necessity, which 
Mill himself recognizes in moral ideas as a law, 
man is not clearly nor distinctly conscious. He 
realizes it through the conflict of passions, in- 
stincts and interests; but the process of re- 
flection by which the individual gradually per- 
ceives an immutable order in his means and 
ends, and assumes a sense of duty, whereas 
he at first felt the influence of the sense and 
of sympathetic elements alone, is the real moral 
moment of consciousness, the jprimitum soli ens 



246 Ethics of Positivism. 

of morality. This moment ^ which Mill does not 
apprehend, was fully realized by the method 
of psychological analysis pursued by Edmund 
Kant, who has been recognized by Schopen- 
hauer — one whom it is not easy to praise — as 
the conqueror of Eudemonism. The estimate 
of Kant's merits in this particular by Schopen- 
hauer is even more significant when we consider 
that he afterward charged Kant with basing the 
science of morals on the Decalogue, whereas 
we think that if there is a fault in Kant's doc- 
trine, it is just in his supposition of a will that 
can be absolute law to itself. 1 In the mind 
of the great philosopher of Konigsberg, such 
autonomy, perhaps, lies in the identity of rea- 
son with the infinite, and may imply, in such a 
case, the moral moment to which we have just 
alluded. This case seems to afford an occasion 
to consider, under a very different aspect, the 
critical question, so long agitated in Germany, 
concerning the fundamental principles of Kant's 
system of ethics; a discussion which throws 

1 See Dei Beiden Grand Probleme der Etftik, Schopen- 
hauer. Frankfort, 1841. 



The Theory of the Moral End. 247 

light on the nature of the disinterested act ; 
for, analysis discovers in that moment of re- 
flection a parallelism between a primal fact of 
consciousness and a primal idea of obligation, 
which appear to be inseparable, both logically 
and experimentally ; and besides the notion of 
the end and of the law, there arises in that 
moment, as the final result of mature reason, 
the disinterested volition which Mill denies, in 
the fourth chapter of his work on Utilitarian- 
ism^ to be implied in our virtuous actions. 

Similar considerations would also apply to 
Mill's idea of rights the notion of which, as 
we pointed out, he conceives to be inseparable 
from the notions of law and of penalty. That 
which Mill calls intensity of instinct in self- 
defense, and to which he attributes absoluteness, 
cannot, by itself, cause us to pass in thought 
from the idea of a mere necessity to the idea 
of duty — from the ought and the should to the 
must, from the Sollen to the Pflicht — without 
the concurrence of a new element which cannot 
be so resolved as to be fully explained by the 
theory of experience alone. 



248 



Ethics of Positivism. 



XYII. 

The origin and nature of moral facts will 
therefore be inexplicable to science while it 
does not take into account the intellectual and 
rational conditions which determine them. The 
essence of what we mean by morality we can 
find in the broader range of speculation which 
we gradually assume by reflection ; and if we 
do not realize that essence since childhood, if 
self-love and sympathy are impulses of our 
nobler affections, and are the echo, as it were, 
of a voice which, later, appeals to us through 
reason, it is only because of a universal law 
by which the lower motives are so coordained as 
to attain to the highest end. We admit, there- 
fore, that in this transition in consciousness, 
from that which we desire instinctively to that 
which we rationally will, there is development 
in some sense, but we cannot conscientiously 
admit that outside of that process of growth 
there is nothing else — no activity implied in 
consciousness substantially different from those 



The Theory of the Moral End. 249 

forces which are reduced to the various elements 
with which science deals. 

Such is our belief both in reference to 
individual consciousness, as we have so far 
investigated, and to collective consciousness as 
recorded in history. It is known how, ac- 
cording to empirical and contrary doctrines, 
moral ideas change essentially from age to age, 
from people to people, and involve simply a 
process of gradual refinement, from the rude 
instincts of the savage to the most delicate 
emotions, under the influence of education and 
of common interest. Such is in general the 
theory which Mill, Bain and the Positive 
school both in England and France support : 
and it is also the theory expounded in a work 
which calls for especial consideration in these 
pages. 

Uuomo e le Scienze Mbrali (Man and the 
Moral Sciences), by Aristide Gabelli, is one of 
the most notable works that have been pro- 
duced in behalf of the Positive doctrines in 
Italy. 1 Rather dissatisfied with the weak efforts 

1 One of the most notable works on Positivism is 



250 Ethics of Positivism. 

of some writers to inculcate views based on 
an imperfect knowledge of what science mar 
have achieved outside of their own land, this 
Italian thinker has endeavored not only to give 
an exposition of Comtism and of the theories 
of the English school, but to add to both many 
original and ingenious observations. Feeling 
combined with reason, and novelty with good 
sense, impart a peculiar charm to his style, 
while they betray the thought which inspires 
the work. Gabelli does not offer an essentially 
new book to the public. Tired of all systems, 
and after indulging, as many others have done, 
in the contemplation of bare facts, he be- 
lieves that we can draw from them, if not prin- 
ciples exactly, at least general ideas which may 
enable us to establish, if not a science in the 
strictest sense of the term, something similar 
to it. ~VTe thus notice that the book is sub- 
stantially the result of a natural disposition of 
the author. The critical study of innate, abso- 
lute, eternal, inexplicable truths which, in his 

La psicologia come scienza posiiiva, by Roberto Ardigo. 
Mantora, 1871. 



The Theory of the Moral End. 251 

opinion, metaphysicians think they find in con- 
sciousness, assumes a broad range in the exam- 
ination which he makes of certain primitive 
tendencies of human nature, such as self-love, 
the love of happiness, and the free scope of oar 
actions. In the course of this examination lie 
is led to believe that social and utilitarian im- 
pulses are at the bottom of the current ideas 
of justice and injustice, of good and evil ; and 
he subsequently applies this criticism to the 
method of moral science, and particularly to 
ethics and to right. But Gabelli does not 
propose to confine himself to criticism alone : 
he says that he wishes to convince, and denies 
that truth, impartially pursued, destroys good 
motives and degrades man by blighting his 
hopes and destroying his illusions. 

This natural sense of moderation, which is 
the best merit of his book, seems also to de- 
tract from its scientific value. That which Ga- 
belli acutely calls the probatojy force of small 
things may hold in so far as we endeavor to 
find everywhere in facts simple and evident 
truths, but it does not hold in complicated 



252 Ethics of Positivism. 

questions concerning various and important ele- 
ments, in cases where the office of criticism is 
not only to connect facts, but to make them 
the grounds upon which a system of accurately 
and strongly connected ideas is to be contra- 
dicted. Very few will deny that Gabelli dwells 
too much on details, and the principles which 
he deduces from his observations do not pos- 
sess the force of demonstration at which his 
criticism aims, with a view to contradict the 
conclusions of his opponents. For instance, we 
do not think that his remarks on self-love dimin- 
ish the evidence upon which we believe in dis- 
interested motives, while he does not prove 
that a disinterested motive is something impos- 
sible in psychology. The accurate proofs which 
he produces against the doctrine of an exces- 
sive and innate liberty are, to say the least, 
inopportune, at a time when no school admits 
it and when he himself falls into the incon- 
sistency of recognizing in man a certain self- 
control. 

The criticism of Gabelli is principally upon 
the historical development of moral conscious- 



The Theory of the Moral End. 253 

ness. But whoever recollects the trouble of 
the speculators on ethics, and knows how often 
a cry has been raised against the belief in a 
constant and immutable direction of moral 
ideas, would be pleased to see a contemporary 
critic revive the question, recurring to entirely 
new facts or to broader and more important con- 
siderations on history. While in England the 
question of moral principles is agitated on the 
results of profound researches, including the 
researches of physiology, and on both sides the 
latest results of psychological studies, travels, 
and investigations in history are produced as 
evidence, it is painful to hear, in a country like 
Italy, in the nineteenth century, the repetition 
of arguments which, since the later part of the 
last century, have been effectively confuted by 
the critical philosophy of the Scotch, by Kant 
and by Cousin. 

Although these proofs could have been ef- 
fectually produced in the times of Locke against 
the doctrine of innate ideas, they are certainly 
insufficient now, when moral unity in different 
historical ages is admitted, not so much, as 



254 Ethics of Positivism. 

Lecky says, as unity of principle^ but as unity 
of tendency. Gabelli's assertion that the no- 
tions of good and evil, of virtue and vice, are 
the same to all men and to all ages, if inter- 
preted literally, would be an insult to history, 
when the common doctrine of speculators, ad- 
mitting an ever-growing influence of intelli- 
gence involved in the principles of morality, 
does not explicitly deny that this constant and 
immutable tendency of mind varies according 
to the times and to the continually changing 
conditions of civilization and customs. We 
believe that Lecky has demonstrated how many 
moral ideas, as, for instance, the ideas about 
usury and abortion, are solely due to the intel- 
lectual progress of the times ; and how we find, 
after mature historical studies, that some of 
the points of difference upon which the posi- 
tions of the negative schools are taken can be 
referred to one and the same moral motive. 
The sentiment of humanity which to-day 
prompts us to care for the aged, the sick and 
the poor, is identical with that sentiment which 
in savage tribes induced the sons to take the 



The Theory of the Moral End. 255 

lives of the fathers who were unable to endnre 
the trials and privations of nomad life. The 
theft of the savage was often the effect of a 
habit of the common possession of property ; 
and it is generally believed that slavery origin- 
ated with the Romans and with other nations 
in the desire to save war prisoners from death. 
We would like to refer the reader to other 
beautiful observations by M. Lecky on this sub- 
ject : especially to the history of chastity, which 
he gives briefly, and to that of the order in 
which moral sentiments develop. 

We then see how the starting point of 
Gabellrs criticism is erroneous. He seems to 
know very little of the school of speculation 
when he speaks so often of innate ideas, of 
inspiration and of natural sense; because, 
although charges like these might have been 
useful a century ago in France and Germany, 
in dealing with the remains of Cartesian phi- 
losophy and with the doctrine of Wolf, they 
are useless at a time when we possess the 
Critique of Pure IZeason, and when the 
Scotch and Positive schools, Gralluppi and Ros- 



256 Ethics of Positivism. 

mini, have made such use of inner experience 
as we all know. We will add, also, at a time 
when, in Germany, France and Italy, Hutche- 
son and his school of moral sense gradually 
give way to rational ethics : this is the case 
even in England, where the school which they 
call Intuitive recognizes even more the part 
which reflection plays in moral phenomena, and 
Hodgson, in his Theory of Practice, calls the 
doctrine opposed to Utilitarianism the doctrine 
of moral law. 

"We think that we have shown how the 
criticism of the Positivists is often based on a 
false interpretation of the opposite doctrines, 
and on a pre-judgment denying the legitimate 
harmony of some principles, to which they are 
opposed, with certain others. Our conclusion 
concerning the theory of association is the same 
in the history of moral ideas. If, in the indi- 
vidual, moral reason unfolds from instinct by a 
process of internal development , without ex- 
cluding the concurrence in that growth of 
some irreducible activity, we do not see why 
the same does not occur in history, and how the 



The Theory of the Moral End. 257 

progressive movement toward moral and scien- 
tific truth does not point to a final ideal which, 
we first recognize indistinctly in our senses and 
sympathies, and finally see in the fullness of 
its splendor by the light of reason. To such 
a belief Gabelli himself seems to lead because 
he admits that, once recognized, moral princi- 
ples and ideas have an immutable and neces- 
sary value, and concedes that man can produce 
them. The course of thought in his book wa- 
vers between empiricism and speculation, and 
is not critical enough to destroy all that he at- 
tacks, nor is it constructive enough to follow to 
the end the natural consequences of the truths 
which continually glimmer before the mind of 
the author. 

XYIII. 

We finally put the question — a question 
of method to which our critical study leads — 
whether a true science of morality can be based 
on the psychological analyses we have so far 
exposed or on the utilitarian tendencies engen- 
dered by self-love, sympathy, and reason. We 
have seen that Mill, Bain and Gabelli claim 



258 Ethics of Positivism. 

to believe that such a science can be founded 
on what their researches bring to light. A 
careful examination of the results of their in- 
vestigations seems to show that their efforts 
to that end are so far ineffectual. The con- 
ception of consciousness to which their analyt- 
ical inquiry into the elements of volition and 
of the idea of the moral end on the basis of as- 
sociation leads, compels us to substantially deny 
that we are responsible for our actions. It leads 
also to the denial of the reflective element, in 
reducing that element to appetite and desire, 
while it mistakes the spontaneous succession of 
internal facts for their causal nexus, their quan- 
titative for their formal differences, and thus 
apparently prevents the framing of a theory 
of responsibility and of law in such a sense as 
we believe we have fully suggested, if not de- 
fined, in the course of this discussion. 

If the conclusions to which the analysis 
of the previously referred to eminent thinkers 
evidently lead are to be accepted, it seems to 
us that neither the subjective and psychological 
basis of ethics, nor the objective basis of science, 



The Theory of the Moral End. 259 

which implies the immediate relation of con- 
sciousness to the absolute, are to be recognized. 
The notion of the useful, such as is formed from 
the empirical knowledge of facts and from their 
generality, cannot by itself define the law of 
morality ; from the o> n cannot come the Sion, 
while in the harmony of ends implied in the 
term Utility we do not perceive, by the light of 
reason, a necessary harmony of ends. 

That it is impossible to establish a system 
of true morality on the method of induction is 
quite effectually shown by some who hold 
opinions diametrically opposed to the Utilitarian 
views. Grote, Lecky, Hodgson, and all the 
speculative school, agree that the doctrine of 
those who consider consequences alone cannot 
be a sufficient basis for morality proper; and 
the recognition of this insufficiency may be said 
to be the prominent point in Anti-Utilitarian 
criticism. But what is more especially worthy 
of note in our case is that Herbert Spencer has 
raised the very same objection against the moral 
philosophy of the Utilitarians. In a letter to 
Mill, reproduced in Bain's Mental and Moral 



260 Ethics of Positivism. 

Science, the great psychologist declares himself 
a Utilitarian only in the abstract, and dissents 
from common Utilitarianism, which he calls 
empirical. Assuming that the ethical principle, 
the science of right, must determine how and 
why certain modes of life are beneficial and 
some others harmful, and that such results, 
not being accidental, must be the neces- 
sary consequence of the nature of things, 
he claims that morality proper deduces 
its laws from the laws of life and also 
from the conditions of existence ; and recur- 
ring to the hypothesis of hereditary transmis- 
sion, he finds, in the organic and psychologi- 
cal modifications, which are transmitted by 
consanguinity, the origin of certain feelings and 
intuitions which do not manifestly originate 
in individual experience. He then refutes the 
Utilitarian doctrine which recognizes as the 
rule of human conduct simply some principles 
which we deduce from experience ; and says 
that ethics must have an independent basis, 
in a certain sense, antecedent to the basis 
which utilitarian experience can give, and, con- 



The Theory of the Moral End. 261 

sequently, a basis antecedent to those senti- 
ments which are supposed to be the results 
of such experience. Herbert Spencer treats 
of moral questions in his Social Statics and 
in some of his Essays, and expects - to treat 
the subject at length as an appendix to 
his Principles of Psychology. Whatever turn 
his doctrine may take, it is certain that his 
mind will reach beyond the limits of induc- 
tion and experience, and venture once more 
in the vast field of speculation which the great 
problem of being offers to the thoughtful. 
That true science leads, sooner or later, to 
the consideration of the highest principles will 
not be denied by the truly scientific ; and 
although we see that many sincere investi- 
gators, dazzled by the awful splendor, turn from 
the contemplation of the highest regions of 
mind, they cannot but pause and meditate 
before the unexpected reflections of that sol- 
emn light in the depths of organism and of 
matter itself. 



III. 



POSITIVISM AND THE HISTORY OF 
PHILOSOPHY. 

I. 

In our examination of Positive morality in 
relation to the mental philosophy which is 
governed by the principle of association, we 
see how the doctrine of Auguste Comte, based 
on some principles of Locke and Hume, has 
developed into a system of psychological analy- 
sis. When the methodical generalities of the 
Sage of Montpellier were enunciated, philoso- 
phical thought was impoverished under the in- 
fluence of the materialistic views of those who 
were without scientific habit, and it could not, 
therefore, recover vigor from the meditations 



264 Ethics of Positivism. 

of Biran as it could from the spiritual re-action 
of Collar d and Cousin. At a time when, even 
in France, the ineffectual attempts of German 
metaphysicians had destroyed faith in meta- 
physics, students hoped to find in science a 
solution of the deep questions which had so 
long perplexed the mind. The method sug- 
i gested by Comte seemed to point to the path 
which would lead to the cherished result, and 
they accordingly gathered encyclopedic infor- 
mation, made of psychology a part of biology, 
and indulged in vague historical generalities. 
The analytical tone of the English mind, in 
contrast with the intuitive character of the Ger- 
man mind, manifested itself in the introspective 
observation of consciousness, as we see in the 
works of Shakspeare ; and the vast results thus 
attained, from Hobbes to the most recent mem- 
bers of the Scotch school, throw a light on 
some of the most obscure aspects of the great 
question of mind that even the spirit of the 
narrowest skepticism could never altogether 
have dimmed. In another country where psy- 
chology had a different and weaker tradition 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 265 

the principles of Hume and Comte would prob- 
ably have resulted negatively ; but, owing to 
the above referred to traits of the English mind, 
those very principles fostered the traditional 
development of analysis in England, and with 
careful criticism there was perserved in that 
country a spark of the true philosophical spirit 
without which German criticism might have 
completely extinguished speculation throughout 
Europe. 

In the beginning of the present century 
there were in England certain moral and polit- 
ical conditions particularly favorable to the 
study of psychology. It is probable that, owing 
to their geographical position and to the nature 
of their institutions, the English have not par- 
ticipated in the political disturbances of the 
continent, and show in their literature and phi- 
losophy the character of that calm progress 
which they seem to make by not deviating too 
abruptly from a certain traditional course. 
With the exception of the great revolution of 
the seventeenth century, moral and political 
revolutions in England have been more like 



266 Ethics of Positivism. 

evolutions. Long and careful preparations have 
generally been made for any contemplated 
changes in the social and political relations, and 
in this way sudden and profound shocks have 
been prevented. This characteristic of the 
English is as evident in their philosophy as 
in other departments. We have seen how the 
Scotch school has greatly modified the philoso- 
phy which Iiobbes based on self-hood, and the 
careful way in which opposite schools consider 
the points involved in the method which has 
been advocated since Bacon. Intellectual con- 
ditions like these, combined with public pros- 
perity, which is truly an essential condition 
of culture and necessary to impartial judgment, 
caused England to contrast favorably with the 
rest of Europe. "While philosophy, like lib- 
erty, reveled in license, there was preserved in 
the atmosphere of conservatism a certain de- 
gree of pure philosophical thought which ulti- 
mately gave rise to a general revival of spec- 
ulation. It can be said, therefore, that, of the 
four European nations to which modern phi- 
losophy seems to belong, England was in the 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 267 

best condition to cope with the ever-increasing 
mistrust which troubled the mind on the rise of 
Positive thought. Both Germany and France, 
which, since 1789, seemed to play, almost 
in concert, the most prominent role in the in- 
tellectual and political movements in Europe, 
the one spoiling the results of her own work 
by weak impulses, and the other often aspir- 
ing to an ideal impossible to be realized, were 
so exhausted in the middle of this century by 
the labor of fifty years that either country 
lacked the speculative temperance and civil 
tranquility necessary to deal properly with a 
new mode of thought. For the rest, it is 
known that all the schools from which German 
philosophy was derived after the fall of He- 
gelianism have, in common with previous doc- 
trines, a metaphysical tendency — although 
Schopenhauer and Herbert agree on some points 
with Positivism, we say all these schools, in- 
cluding the school of Biichner and Moleschott, 
which is intrinsically materialistic. We have 
also shown that this applies, in a great meas- 
ure, to Littre and some other French Positiv- 



268 Ethics of Positivism. 

ists. Taine, who is probably the only one 
among them who has relied mnch on interior 
observations in psychology, may be said to be- 
long to the English school whose path he 
follows. 

At this point we wish to observe that the 
new turn which the influence of Positive ideas 
gave to philosophy seems to have found in 
Italy, more than elsewhere, certain favorable 
conditions of thought. Sensualism and mate- 
rialism never succeeded in taking deep root in 
that country, somewhat for the same reason 
which prevented the bold attempts of liberty 
and spared the people the infamies which might 
have been perpetrated in its name, and also 
on account of the foresight of the princes who 
granting civil rights seem to have anticipated 
the wish underlying reckless political move- 
ments. In Italy, while the clergy speculated 
on theological trifles, the traditions of the Re- 
naissance, the school of Galileo and Yico and 
the early revival of experimental doctrines ini- 
tiated by Gioza, Genovesi and Galluppi were 
promising a system of thought that would be 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 269 

positive in the right sense of the word, without 
losing the essential traits of philosophy. The 
traditions of this philosophy we find continued 
in the works of Rosmini, Gioberti, Mamiani and 
others. Many who have too much sympathy 
with foreign doctrines may not recognize the 
fact of this continued tradition, but history 
cannot fail to attach due importance to it. 

But the influence of those doctrines, so pow- 
erful at first, especially in the political world, 
could not be exerted in some other countries, 
mainly owing to two causes which forced na- 
tional thought to deviate from its course. The 
first of these is the skepticism which, without 
recognizing in the Italian schools the fact of 
a new speculation opposed to that of Kant, but 
claiming to be the latest result of German 
theories, and to refute in their name any other 
principles, killed in the very germ all philos- 
ophical activity. The other cause to which we 
have reference is the absolute idealism which, 
admitting the possibility of metaphysical know- 
ledge, nevertheless compelled the mind to de- 
part from objective investigation in order to 



270 Ethics of Positivism. 

substitute for it that which Schopenhauer, with 
much cogency, called a dialectic delirium. It 
is well understood that through the intrigues 
of foreigners, partly under the protection of 
the Church, and in a land where the conditions 
favorable to deep thinking could not exist under 
political bondage, Italian philosophy could not 
freely develop, and consequently prematurely 
decayed. Mental activity was the distinguish- 
ing trait of a few solitary men at a time when 
systems should have been succeeded by schools, 
teachers by practical followers, and mental life 
invigorated by contact with foreign thought. 
There could not have been a better opportunity 
for the Italian philosophers who were then 
under the influence of Latin traditions, and 
not subject to attacks of reckless criticism and 
powerless faith, to reconcile the pretended ab- 
solute knowledge of Pantheism with the nega- 
tions of all scientific truths, than that afforded 
by the brief stage of mental exhaustion between 
the decline of the German speculative move- 
ment and the succession of the Positive mode 
of thought. If the philosophical thinkers of 



JPositivisin and History of Philosophy. 271 

Italy had shown a mediating and reconciling 
spirit, it would have been an evidence of their 
right to the independent national existence 
which they subsequently assumed. If so much 
was not accomplished it was because the Italians 
did not seize their opportunity ; probably for 
the same reason for wmich they formerly failed 
to participate in the literary and scientific move- 
ment of Europe. The Italian mind was abso- 
lutely concentrated on the idea of national unity 
and independence. The other departments — lit- 
erature, science, industry, commerce — were not 
yet national traits. Philosophy, especially as it 
appears since Kant, constantly engaged in ex- 
amining principles and methods, and consider- 
ing the criticism of the past and the future of 
speculation, cannot fully develop except where 
true national existence brings the minds in con- 
tact with each other and favors the diffusion of 
knowledge. While life may be entirely intel- 
lectual and scientific, as it has been for centuries 
in some northern countries where the people 
require much less than the people of the south? 
with the Latin race, in which the most powerful 



272 Ethics of Positivism. 

bond of the mind and soul is law, if national 
impulses are to be realized in certain civil 
relations they must be entirely political. This 
partially explains why France is the only one 
of the three Latin nations which found in Car- 
tesianism a true and great philosophy. In 
France national unity may be said to have 
been established since Louis XL 

It is a well known fact that for the last 
thirty years — nay, since the commencement of 
the present century — the only aim which the 
Italians have had constantly and earnestly in 
view is their political re-constitution, and that 
all the most active forces of the nation have 
been more or less employed in the great task 
of attaining to that ideal ; so much is this the 
case that it can be said that during this period 
Italian literature, art, science, even speculation 
itself, have been forms or implications of po- 
litical thought. It is true that philosophy, in 
so far as it relates to principles and methods, 
has been preserved in a substantially specula- 
tive form, especially by such thinkers as Gal- 
luppi, Rosmini and Mamiani ; but it can hardly 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 273 

be denied that, owing to the public position 
of those who professed it. and above all to the 
great political preoccupation of the Italians, 
philosophy has often been disturbed in its 
purely ideal regions. In short, Italy has been 
obliged to make her philosophy while she has 
been engaged in the most strenuous efforts to 
make herself nationally independent. Two 
very difficult undertakings these have certainly 
been. In the attempts to accomplish both ends 
it has been necessary to consider what would 
harmonize in many generations that they might 
be essentially united under certain national con- 
ditions. It appears, therefore, that the specu- 
lations of those schools and disciples who co- 
operated effectually in the Italian national move- 
ment could not properly develop for political 
reasons ; nor could they exercise upon the minds 
of foreign speculators, and particularly upon 
the Positive mind, that critical and concili- 
ating influence to which we have alluded. In 
order to initiate in a people a movement in 
certain ideas and studies it sometimes only 
needs the impulse of a book, of a great public 



274 Ethics of Positivism. 

necessity, the word and authority of one man ; 
but to extend the movement beyond one prov- 
ince, to all the nation, so that it may promote 
other movements and inspire literature, art and 
morals, and make its influence felt upon the 
doctrines and studies of foreign countries, that 
one first impulse, or authority of one school, 
does not suffice. It requires the persistent and 
united efforts of a studious people, of a hard- 
working public ; for, the life of institutions, 
doctrines or schools, follows also the law of 
other organisms which, although enabled to 
live through the organs of nutrition alone, re- 
quire the organs of activity to be in relation 
to other organisms. Such organs are in this 
case the propagating power of the press and 
of public opinion, the activity of criticism, the 
voice of professors, the attention and the care 
of students. These are the conditions which 
in Europe, combined with the genius of the 
teachers, gave to German thought the import- 
ance which, for the same reasons, was formerly 
attached to the philosophy of Socrates, the 
school of Alexandria, Scholasticism and Carte- 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 275 

sianism, and, more recently, the Scotch school. 
It must be admitted that until lately such con- 
ditions were wanting in Italy ; and it would 
be well for those critics who, considering the 
slow development of Italian philosophy and its 
remote relations to foreign schools, do not re- 
cognize in it either scientific value or, as they 
say, historical signincance, to remember the 
evils with which Italy has been afflicted for 
long centuries. If these critics would under- 
stand that philosophical systems are not only 
abstract forms of thought, but living manifest- 
ations of the human soul, they would, no doubt, 
recognize in the civil conditions under which 
Italian philosophy has already developed, some 
of the reasons why that nation has not contrib- 
uted, as it should and could have done, to the 
movement of European philosophical thought. 



II. 

On the other hand, in considering what 
has been written in Italy upon Positive phi- 
losophy it is evident that conditions more or 



276 Ethics of Positivism. 

less extrinsic to philosophical thought, and those 
very conditions which have contributed to the 
political reorganization of the country, have 
also contributed to the movement of thought 
' implied in those writings. The rise of Positiv- 
ism in Italy is not to be regarded, as it would 
be in England, as the effect of the harmony 
between the native mind and some foreign 
thinkers ; but as the adoption of foreign ideas 
favorable to the liberal spirit, and opposed to 
theology, to the scholasticism of the clergy, and 
to political slavery. It has, therefore, been 
more of a revolution than a development — more 
of a civil event than a philosophical result. 
There are many proofs of this. In Italy Pos- 
itivists are all, or nearly all, ignorant of or 
opposed to every sort of speculation, including 
psychological speculation ; and, unlike the Eng- 
lish, they ignore the history of science in their 
own country ; or, having formerly been of other 
schools, they hope to find in the new one the 
reflection of their former doctrines. History 
does not record this movement of ideas, al- 
though Italian Positivism deserves to be quali- 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 277 

fied as such, notwithstanding that it lacks unity, 
consciousness of its own tendency, and rigor- 
ous criticism. Italian Positivists generally dis- 
agree in everything except in contradicting 
what they call theology and scholasticism, 
which they seem to find in almost every form 
of thought. When requested to state a de- 
cided opinion they unconsciously express a 
materialistic, Hegelian or empirical tendency, 
everything, in fact, except such a positive mode 
of thought as results from a strictly logical 
process of reasoning. In reality, whoever faith- 
fully follows the doctrines of Comte cannot 
give the terms experience, law, causality, force 
and the like any meaning but that which Comte 
himself attributed to them in conformity to 
the definitions of Hume ; and when the Eng- 
lish enunciate such ideas as their own, and 
refuse, at the same time, to be called followers 
of Comte, they seem to be justified in their 
claims, as the tradition of the speculation from 
which Comtism was drawn is to be found in 
their country. But, we ask, by what right — - 
in the name of what tradition — do those Ital- 



278 Ethics of Positivism. 

ians who call themselves Positivists and disci- 
ples of Comte appeal to the method of Galileo, 
who not even incidentally ever thought of the 
skeptical ideas of that French philosopher ; 
and according to what mode of criticism do 
phrenologists, and we should almost say physi- 
ologists, like Comte and Littre, and decided 
materialists like Biichner and Moleschott, count 
so often on Mill, Bain and Spencer, who pro- 
foundly dissent from the French views and 
admit a psychology distinct from biology and 
from social dynamism ? It may be said in 
reply that these accidental differences of doc- 
trine disappear in the wide scope of the ex- 
perimental method which all these philosophers 
accept. But history shows that while Galileo 
started with a natural conception of experi- 
ence, of observation, and of cause, the premises 
of Comte involved a negative postulate result- 
ing from previous skepticism and sensualism ; 
a postulate which the English made very pro- 
ductive through the method of internal analy- 
sis, and from which the French derived vague 
scientific and historical generalities, while the 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 279 

Germans, reaching the conclusions of Corate 
by a different way — by metaphysics — gave to 
the negative aspect of philosophy a metaphys- 
ical form, as we see even in Feuerbaeh and 
Biichner. 

The terms experience, experimental method, 
Positive philosophy, are often used in Italy 
to denote the doctrines of foreign thinkers for 
the purpose of contradicting speculators, or, 
as they call them, theologians. They use these 
terms in but one and the same sense, while 
they have three different meanings respectively 
in France, England and Germany. The criti- 
cism upon speculation is not, however, as seri- 
ous in Italy as it should be in order to become 
a part and condition of science ; and in this, 
also, foreign influence is more injurious than 
beneficial. One of the effects of many revo- 
lutions and political slavery in the past is that 
almost any foreign idea, method or custom 
easily attains popularity in that country, and, 
consequently, the study of foreign doctrines, 
instead of promoting, by examples and com- 
parisons, freedom in method, and the gradual 



280 Ethics of Positivism, 

and continuous development of national ideas, 
has profoundly and almost inevitably hindered 
them. This is due to the fact that Italian 
students lack one of the most important con- 
ditions in pursuing this study — they are not 
well prepared for it. The only condition on 
which Italian philosophy might have derived 
benefit from the examples of foreign philoso- 
phy is that the ideas which originated abroad 
should have become connected with the na- 
tional mind, not as vague and absolute gener- 
alities, but as distinct both in origin and 
nationality, and directly derived from the 
whole history of European thought. We fear 
that this cannot be said to be the case in most 
of the works on Positivism in Italy. Except- 
ing a few which we have duly examined, they 
do not clearly or accurately expose the source 
of the opinions which they express, nor do they 
explain their relations to the three principal 
tendencies of Positivism in Europe. Apart 
from the somewhat loose criticism upon con- 
temporary metaphysics, they do not seem to 
agree in any respect. They certainly do not 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 281 

in psychology. Not one of these Positivists 
has done anything in psychology which can, 
even in part, be compared, either in accuracy 
or observation, with what Posmini, and, more 
recently, Bain and Spencer and some others, 
have accomplished. They do not compare with 
the English in logic, nor have they yet pro- 
duced a truly scientific treatise on Positive 
ethics. Notwithstanding so much uncertainty 
of purpose, and the deficiencies that we have 
just pointed out, these Positivists claim to con- 
stitute a school, properly so-called, and believe 
they have triumphed over metaphysics and the- 
ology. 

III. 

We have deemed it necessary to make 
frankly the foregoing explanations. Positive 
criticism in Italy is so full of the usual gener- 
alities on method, and of the usual declama- 
tions against philosophy pure and proper, that 
to one unfamiliar with the tenor of the writ- 
ings of foreign Positivists it would be difficult 
to conceive how, laying aside the sterile nega- 



282 Ethics of Positivism, 

tions with which their doctrines abound, they 
could attempt the task of establishing a system 
of psychology, of logic, or of morality. We have 
pointed out, however, that the work of recon- 
struction originated in a certain development 
of Positive thought, particularly manifested in 
England, where both moral and civil interests 
and the instinctive desire to examine inner life 
led to the study of the soul. It is true that 
these causes would not have been sufficient in 
themselves, if a certain essentially home tradi- 
tion had not been combined with the doctrine 
of Comte ; and, as we have shown in the course 
of our remarks, there has always been this 
tradition, and of such efficacy that all that is 
faithful and applicable in Positivism is now 
represented in the tendency of Positive thought 
in England. 

> If, on the contrary, we consider that part 
in the Course of Positive Philosophy and the 
writings of Littre which relates to the study of 
the soul, we will see that .their method of teach- 
ing psychological analysis in terms of biology 
and social physics is impracticable. We have 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 283 

already suggested that Comte's denial of mental 
reflection was the result of doctrines opposing 
the method of facts. Comte would have been 
much more consistent and positive if he had 
pursued, like the English, the method of accu- 
rate observation, instead of accepting a principle 
which transcends, and even denies, the phenom- 
ena alone which he proposed to investigate. It 
is most probable that he would thus have re- 
newed a useful study of human consciousness 
in the Positive school of France without explod- 
ing his psychology or social physics. 

It cannot be denied that, excluding the sub- 
jective method, and the reality of the phenom- 
ena which it reveals, the social physics to which 
Comte attributes the office of completing con- 
temporary science falls to the ground. He 
considers that the claims which such a science 
lays to validity are founded on what he calls 
the social fact ; a fact resulting, not from 
the nature of the individual considered sepa- 
rately, but from the action of individuals upon 
each other, and which is given by the collective 
study of the species. Such would be the phi- 



284 Ethics of Positivism. 

j losophy of history founded on a scientific reason; 
the study of man in his civil and political being, 
not as an aggregation alone, but as a part of 
nature, as the effect of deeply impressed and 
I indellible dispositions involved in the action of 
the race upon the individual. It is necessary, 
however, for those who, in good faith, admire 
Comte's Sociology, to bear in mind that the in- 
dividual has not, in that philosopher's opinion, 
subjective unity, unity of consciousness ; that 
the rational and moral element by which he is 
distinguished from other living organisms enter 

I into his being only as transformations of and 
additions to elements of sensibility. This - ad- 
mitted, man is no longer a true individual ; for^j 
idea of the consciousness or knowledge 
which the individual has of an energy underly- 
ing his own modifications must be discarded 
witli the idea of an intelligent and responsible 
subject ; and if we remove this idea of personal 

I unity, which alone enables us to penetrate the 
impersonal unity of nature, we must conceive 
nature to be devoid of productive 'power, an 
empty and inactive receptacle of phenomena. 



•* 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 285 

Thus the very phenomena which, in another 
conception, are gathered in the subject and con- 
nected by relations of cause and effect, of pas- 
sion and action, are in this case conceived to be 
united merely by relations of contiguity in time 
and space. We see, then, that with the ideas 
of consciousness, of force, of cause, and of sub- 
ject, there are denied in Comte the true relations 
between internal and external facts. All the 
scientific field is, therefore, an immense scheme 
based on sense and memory, and which any 
skeptic may at option remove from our con- 
templation. 

If such are the conclusions to which Comt- 
ism leads, as they certainly are, even if Comte 
classifies the facts of the various sciences accord- 
ing to their greater or less degree of generality, 
the only way to conceive those facts as certain 
unities is to determine the material relations 
which connect them in time and space. As- 
tronomy, physics, chemistry and physiology are 
thus distinct as the mass, the structure, and the 
modes of action vary in bodies, as the mate- 
rial conditions vary in the facts observed ; and 



286 Ethics of Positivism. 

biology becomes psychology for Comte, as he 
believed he discovered in the nervous system 
the centers and the visible basis of mental 
functions. But, by this method, nothing fur- 
ther is explained, although there is yet to be 
given another concrete and palpable unity as 
the substratum of the social fact. Regarded in 
itself, this cannot be, for Comte, but an ab- 
straction of psychical phenomena in the indi- 
vidual ; and studied in its elements, which alone 
should have a scientific value for this phre- 
nologist, it is again classed under organic and 
cerebral functions. This is a logical conse- 
quence. When individual consciousness ceases, 
and human facts lose their internal unity, to 
become identified with other facts in infinite 
nature, and are then nothing more than nervous 
impressions, waves, or reflections in the eyes 
of the psychologist, we cannot see, under the 
complex form which those facts assume in soci- 
et}^ and history, any more than a particular 
adaptation of correlated organisms. The dis- 
tinction which Comte makes between a static 
and dynamic study of living beings, according 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 287 

as their intellectual acts are considered, either 
in the organic conditions on which they depend, 
or in the use of those acts in leading man to 
scientific results, seems to be insufficient to 
prove that social physics should not be treated 
as a mere appendix to anatomy and physiology. 
In fact, if a social phenomenon is investigated 
through the observation of external and sensible 
life, as Comte appears to insist upon, it cannot, 
strictly speaking, be distinguishable from the 
material conditions in which it occurs ; if, on 
the other hand, the social phenomenon is consid- 
ered in itself and in its subjective being, we 
cannot but conclude that consciousness lies at 
the base of sociology and history. 

It is clear that as Comte's study reduces J 
man, intellectually and socially, to a physio- 
logical fact of particular organisms, or of cor- 
related organisms, nothing worthy of being 
called moral investigation has a place in the 
Positive doctrines of France. The English 
school obviates in a great measure the objec- 
tions which can logically be based on the fore- 
going points. It is true that the English phi- 



288 



Ethics of Positivism. 



losophers deny the possibility of apprehending 
immediately the moral act as the effect of our 
free agency, and try to argue against the idea 

/ of an absolute good; but the inquiry into the 
subjective conditions in which the sentiments 
of obligation, the ideas of honesty, of right and 
of law originates marks the moral theory of 
Mill, Bain and Spencer, as a most important 
branch of psychology independent of the sci- 
ence of organisms. Recognizing in the nature 
jof the facts of inner life something which dis- 
tinguishes them from the facts of life in general, 
English Positivists at least entertain views that 
we can philosophically criticise in relation to 
the strict requirements of the experimental 
method ; although they do certainly not estab- 
lish by their method a pure and proper science 
of morality. They give a wide scope to ethics, 

/ as they apply their theories to the philosophy 
of history and to the philosophy of a science. of 
character which Mill and Bain profess as a 
doctrine drawn from the more general laws of 
the mind, with a view to determine " the kind 
of character produced in conformity to those 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 289 

general laws by any set of circumstances, phy- 
sical and moral." Ethology, as they call it, 
might serve the same purpose in the question 
of character that mathematical deduction in 
determining the future position of a planet does 
in astronomy. Presupposing the fundamental 
laws of mind, and, to a certain extent, the con- 
ditions which modify them, ethology might es- 
tablish a priori the nature and the mode of 
certain moral situations ; it being understood 
that such conclusions would have to be verified 
from the observation of human nature in our own 
age and in history. They admit, however, that, 
while, in astronomy, facts, properly so called, 
can be deduced, in ethology tendencies, and not 
facts, can be affirmed, owing to our ignorance 
of the essential nature of the soul and of the 
operations of the agencies which modify it. 
Any one may see how such a science, based on 
deep psychological knowledge, would benefit 
practical morality, particularly education, poli- 
tics and econom}^ ; and let us note that, although 
we believe with Mill that the real causes which 
modify human character cannot be known, and 



290 



Ethics of Positivism. 



admit that our free agency determines to a cer- 
tain extent the tendency of our actions, but much 
less powerfully than external circumstances, it 
is not less true that, of all the Positive thinkers, 
the English alone can give at least an outline 
of a science of character, whereas the modifica- 
tions of human nature which internal analysis 
alone can reveal are not investigated in the 
system of Comte, who confines himself to the 
external observation of organisms and historical 
facts. Comte's aversion to psychology, and 
therefore to ethics, extends by virtue of the 
same principles to the very art of education 
to which the French philosopher thought his 
principles would be applied with greater and 
more immediate results. 1 

JFor a full exposition of the views pointed out 

above, see Auguste Comte's Cours de Philosopliie Positive, 
I and II. John S. Mill's Augusts Comte and Positivism. 
Littre's Auguste Comte et la Philosopliie Positive. Mill's 
System of Logic, Book VI, "In the. Logic of the Moral 
Sciences," and chapter V, " Of Ethology." And, particu- 
larly, Alexander Bain, on The Study of Character, Includ- 
ing an Estimate of Phrenology 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 291 



IV. 

We think that we have clearly explained 
why, in the course of this essay, we considered, 
almost exclusively, the doctrines of English Posi- 
tivists. Of all the various forms of thought, 
more or less impressed with the metaphysical 
spirit which the anti-speculative mind derived 
from Germany, and with the unproductive the- 
ories of Comte on one side, and the vague 
tendency of Italian Positivism on the other, 
the English alone follow a path which may 
lead to the development of whatever good there 
may be in Positivism. The works of James 
Mill, J. S. Mill, Bain, Spencer, Lewes, Bailey, 
Morell and Murphy, and the earlier works of 
Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Hartley, Eras- 
mus Darwin, and some Scotch writers, constitute 
a school in which we must recognize and appre- 
ciate the value of many very fine analyses, the 
full exposition of a psychological law, and many 
useful discoveries, notwithstanding that there 
is often a lack of impartiality and breadth of 
inquiry and a certain speculative intuition. 



292 Ethics of Positivism, 

While Comte himself obstructed the highway 
of science, and subjective observation was com- 
promised in its best results by the too transcen- 
dental efforts of the Germans, and the Italians 
were too deeply engaged in the work of na- 
tional reconstruction to share harmoniously in 
the advance of psychology and metaphysics, 
the English accepted the watchword of France 
and pursued the Positive path, but, honoring 
an old tradition, they saved psychology from 
the wreck of philosophical doctrines. Psy- 
chology, in its turn, preserved moral inquiry, 
seizing, at the same time, the best opportunity 
to give a powerful impulse to the interrupted 
course of speculation ; the future of which now 
depends on certain conditions which will never 
be realized unless the present movement of 
Positive thought joins issue with the leading 
question of contemporary philosophy. 

Y. 

The movement of thought in free inquiry 
appeared with the Renaissance and Reformation, 
but we are only just beginning to realize the 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 293 

vast field that has been gone over since that 
epoch. A long series of investigations extends 
from that time to the present, and, although 
every one of those investigations has a char- 
acter of its own, we see them gather and as- 
sume historical value of succession in the phil- 
osophy of Kant. In Vinci and Bruno, Car" 
tesianism was anticipated, which, in its turn, 
foreshadowed the Critique of Pure Reason, 
and the mind which for more than three cen- 
turies had endeavored to react upon itself does 
not appear to have fully attained its self-posses- 
sion until philosophy had been through and 
beyond the middle terms of the critical sorites. 
This implies various lines converging to one 
point, like echoes which resound through the 
valley and finally meet on the distant moun- 
tain. Such is the history of Criticism, w T hich 
started with a revolt against Aristotelianism, 
and caused the overthrow of the metaphysics 
of Christian Wolf, and in the course of which 
questions preliminary to the final problem have 
been solved ; and it is in this history that we 
find the prominent philosophers of the Renais- 



294: Ethics of Positivism. 

sance, Galileo and Descartes, Locke and Yico, 
Berkeley and Hume. The historical necessity 
of the premises which they gave to the critical 
sorites is now very well known. In our day 
the title Critique of Pure Reason denotes not 
only the work of Kant, but expresses an idea 
which has been made explicit through analysis, 
and which has given rise to the idea of know- 
ledge in the minds of students; the idea of know- 
ledge dealing with itself and endeavoring to 
realize itself in the essential conditions of its own. 
being. But, in order that Criticism should attain 
to this idea, and that Reason should see in it its 
own reflection, it was necessary to remove one 
by one the obstacles that philosophers them- 
selves had put in the way to the right conception 
of things. From the close of the Middle Ages 
to the rise of Cartesianism, the problem of Crit- 
icism implied two capital points : namely, the in- 
dependence of thought from the objective world 
wdiich hampered its free action, and the method- 
ical and rational attitude which the mind should 
assume before the objective and subjective 
orders. This is the reason why the critical 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 295 

movement as expressed by Bruno and Luther 
resembled at first the desperate struggle of 
a prisoner to escape, whereas with Galileo and 
Descartes it was like the calm and peaceful 
mind of one who, being free from external 
obstacles, finds in himself the object of his 
study. 

In the Middle Ages the mind conceived 
internal and external nature under the pres- 
sure of authority and faith, and it was the task 
of the Renaissance and the Reformation to crit- 
icise this authority and faith. The mind, how- 
ever, needed laws, criterion and guidance, all 
of which it had to find in itself and in that 
immediate relation to things which is part of 
its nature. The criticism of method which 
followed the Reformation, and with which it 
is logically connected, like the second period 
of the Renaissance in Europe, took its name 
from the experience which Galileo recognized 
as an experience of the senses and of the ex- 
ternal world, and Descartes as a psychical and 
internal experience. At this point the prob- 
lem of philosophy became peculiarly compli- 



296 Ethics of Positivism. 

cated. It had so far been a problem of method 
in the most obvious sense of the word, an in- 
vestigation of the path and the attitude which 
the mind should have assumed in its endeav- 
ors to comprehend things. Galileo and Des- 
cartes had concluded that that path could have 
been only observation, and that attitude but 
the immediate reference of the mind to its own 
objects and to itself. But, for Galileo, the 
problem was solved on grounds of sensuous 
experience alone : lie thought that, when re- 
garded in itself, there was revealed in nature the 
secret of its laws; whereas in Descartes' mind 
the immediate opposition of thought to itself 
transformed, since then, a question of method 
into a question of essence, the criticism of cog- 
nitions into a criticism of the understanding. 
It was the question of how science should 
begin and how science is possible. He did 
not, however, and could not, go much further. 
The problem which he himself raised was 
ever beyond his reach, owing to the many other 
questions which resulted from it, and although 
he appears to have dimly perceived the grounds 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 297 

upon which the main problem could have been 
solved, he failed to grapple successfully with a 
question which was to remain open for so long. 
Descartes had explicit knowledge of the at- 
tempts which Criticism had made before his 
time, so that the whole problem of method was 
resumed in his system. But, without fully 
realizing it, he initiated a certain course of 
thought which directly connects his philosophy 
with that of subsequent speculators. Descartes 
thus marks, in the history of philosophy, 
not so much the dawn as the close of a new 
era. In his speculations there is implied a 
spirit of contradiction which, in spite of him- 
self, carries him along toward the vast field 
upon which are still arrayed the conten ding- 
parties in the great question of subject and ob- 
ject, of thought and being. Considering at 
bottom the distinction between these two phases 
of life, and the imperfect way in which Des- 
cartes himself appreciated it, we may explain 
why critics doubted the logical value of his 
famous enthememe, and how he went beyond 
it so soon in order to rise to the idea of God, 



298 Ethics of Positivism, 

and the often contradictory reasons which he 
gave of this and other innate ideas. Those 
who believe they find in Descartes reasons for 
denying the progress of philosophy, contrasting 
the direct and infallible results of the reform 
initiated by Galileo with the hesitating tenor 
of Descartes' writings, should bear in mind 
how much the vital question of philosophy had 
changed since his time, and what a long step 
had been taken in scientific reflection to rec- 
ognize that in all knowledge and in every prin- 
ciple thought recognizes itself. 

The novelty of Descartes' system was, there- 
fore, that the mind realizes thought as one of 
its original facts. The inquiry initiated in the 
Renaissance had been carried to this point, 
and, while he could look back over the ground 
which the human mind had traversed to reach 
it, there was a region beyond it yet to be 
explored. Reflecting upon itself both as sub- 
ject and object, as being and fact, thought was 
not then as it appeared in later times in the 
analysis of Kant. It was, as it had been con- 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 299 

ceived in the Middle Ages, a matter which 
Criticism had not as yet seriously taken up 
in connection with innate and immutable ele- 
ments. It is not surprising, then, if Descartes, 
after unconsciously indulging in such specula- 
tions on thought, outgrew them equally uncon- 
sciously, believing he thus opened a way to the 
solution of the problem of being both in the 
subjective and objective world. It is known 
that Malebranche's theory of occasional causes, 
and Spinoza's definitions, are the results of cer- 
tain points in the old philosophy, points which 
had not been sufficiently valued, and which es- 
caped the investigations of the great critic of 
Turraine. The question of the opposition be- 
tween the two terms of the Cartesian dualism, 
the substantia cogitans and the substantia 
extensa, which the two great metaphysicians 
thought they had disposed of forever, was, in 
fact, to be raised again under another form 
in the criticism of Kant, in case he should 
have shown that this opposition was not the 
same that he introduced between the ideal and 



300 Ethics of Positivism. 

the real, between the noumenon and phenom- 
enon, but was all in the latter. 1 

The problem of method became the prob- 
lem of the very content of thought, and, as such, 
it was transmitted from Descartes to Locke, 
Leibnitz, Berkeley, Hume and Kant. The 
French philosopher decided that we have knowl- 
edge through the medium of ideas conceived as 
innate forms of mind. It was therefore nec- 
essary to resolve ideas into their elements in or- 
der to find out what thought was in itself; and, 
as in the previous doctrines the problem of the 
being of ideas was combined with the problem 
of their origin, it was necessary to explain their 
origin in relation to the various orders of knowl- 
edge. To the Cartesian criticism of method 
succeeded, therefore, Locke's criticism of ideas. 
But in the way in which the latter expressed 
the problem there was from the beginning an 
error which made his analysis insufficient. The 
path which Descartes had unconsciously pur- 

1 Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena, I, II. Dr. 
Julius Frauenstadt, Brief vber die Schopenhauer's die Phi- 
losophie. Leipzig, F. A. Brokhaus/1854, 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 301 

sued should have led him not only to the study 
of thought in itself, but also to the essential con- 
ditions upon which thought refers to objects. 
But to examine ideas was to examine cognitions 
and not the act of knowing; it was not really to 
study knowledge in itself, but in one of its partic- 
ular aspects, and it was a mode of analysis which 
might have led to a vicious circle if, in the first 
empirical elements in which originated this or 
that idea, there was already the impress and the 
act of the understanding. This is the history of 
the investigations of Locke. He undertook the 
task of criticism as a study of knowledge, and 
sought in vain the origin of knowledge in ideas. 
But, while he thus destroyed some prevailing 
artificial notions of thought, he made the mis- 
take of not perceiving that, after solving the em- 
pirical data of knowledge, there was still thought 
as their formal condition, and of reducing the 
mind to a merely passive recipient. Leibnitz 
opposed him, and prepared, in his New Essays, 
the full synthesis of the passive and active 
aspects of knowledge, a synthesis in which lay 
the real merit of Kant. 



302 Ethics of Positivism, 

The critical controversy thus resulted in a 
series of contrasts which prevailing in turns 
were to bring it to its close. To the contrast 
of authority with reason, of the a priori method 
with that of experience, of the sense with the 
intellect, succeeded the more profound contrast 
of thought with itself. Locke's analysis and 
the Essays of Leibnitz had revealed the content 
of the understanding ; but the fault in Locke's 
doctrine, was, as we know, in not distinguishing 
in the understanding between matter and form, 
in not considering that the one implies the mode 
and act of knowing when we investigate it in 
the immediate knowledge of things, in which 
case its form is given us by the senses. The 
unconscious passage from thought to being, as 
we noticed in the speculations of Descartes, 
was now explicitly realized by the great critic, 
but under the imperfect and even unscientific 
form of the Sensualism of Locke. If the mind 
forms its notion with elements of sensibility, 
and sense never penetrates by itself beyond 
the phenomenal, it was as well to attribute to 
subjective appearances, as Locke did, a subject- 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 303 

ive value, as it was to go futher and deny in 
those appearances any relation to the real. 
The terms of this double inference are given 
by Berkeley and Hume. The phenomenal idea 
of the Bishop of Cloyne is no more at bottom 
than the sensible representation of Locke ; but, 
as Kant justly remarks, he does not distinguish 
the cognition from the mode of cognizing ; and 
while he confines thought to itself in relation 
to the objective world, he leaves it free in the 
immediate knowledge of the I and of the abso- 
lute. By David Hume alone are the analyses 
of Locke and Berkeley completed. With his 
more critical and rigorous genius, he suggests 
a doubt of the correspondence of the object 
with the representative idea. He carries the 
theories of Berkeley further, solving the I into 
a series of internal states, and, as Locke does not 
grasp in his analysis the true synthesis of formal 
conceptions, nor that of causality, he reduces 
these syntheses to various orders of impressions 
involved in the unity of consciousness. In him 
we begin to see Kant and nearly the criticism 
of a priori synthetical judgments. But the 



304 



Ethics of Positivism. 



empirical path, in which the sensualism of the 
Essay had turned the English, never led them 
to a full comprehension of the psychological 
problem ; it did not raise them above the con- 
tent of experience to its true being, and did 
not induce them to ask what it was and how the 
receptivity and unifying activity could be which 
they attributed to the spirit in perception. 1 

This last aspect of the critical inquiry was 
first discussed in Germany. It had been sug- 
gested by Leibnitz, and was clearly outlined by 
*Kant. Considering that aspect under an incom- 
plete form, the Scotch school anticipated too 

1 In reference to Berkeley and Hume, see particularly 
George Lewes' Biographical History of Philosophy ; Bain's 
Mental and Moral Science, Book III, chapter vii; Theories 
of the Material World. As to the relations of the English 
critics to Kant, whom we wish to particularly note, see 
Erdmann's Geschichte der Philosophic, Vol. II, page 269. 
Berlin, 1870. Students know that the study of Berkeley 
has lately been taken up in England, America, and also 
in Germany. The Positivists agree with him on some 
points, which confirms the relations which we establish 
between empirical doctrines and criticism previous to 
Kant. See, also, Diihring, Kritische Geschichte der Philoso- 
phic von ihren Anfdngen bis zur Gegenwart, Berlin, 1869. 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 305 

much a revival of objective investigation, while 
they should have followed the latest conclusions 
of criticism upon knowledge. After Berkeley 
and Hume the inquiry of representative ideas, 
upon which that school rested, could be said to 
be mature, and it would, perhaps, have sufficed 
against the conclusions of the negative philoso- 
phy if, with those two philosophers, the last 
period of Criticism, which Reid never fully ap- 
prehended, had not been initiated. The fact 
that it remained outside proves that the results 
of the Scotch school were less important than 
might have been expected. It was premature, 
as it preceded Kant, to which it should logically 
have succeeded, whereas Yico, almost a century 
before him, initiated the mode of historical in- 
quiry which, latterly, and especially after Hegel, 
became the truest form which the study of the 
human spirit assumed in contemporaneous phil- 
osophy. 

Thus we see included in one speculative 
movement the various aspects which the ques- 
tion of Knowledge assumed from the revival 
of Learning to Kant, in whom this question 



306 Ethics of Positivism. 

seems to culminate for the present, at least. 
The Critique of Pure Reason is the point 
to which the different paths pursued by the 
predecessors of the great Grerman thinker con- 
verge, so that he can from his standpoint sur- 
vey and distinguish the respective tendencies 
of speculation which led to it. Kant fully 
comprehended the question which he brought 
to a climax, but even this philosopher was not 
beyond the influence of the common law, and 
he did not apprehend the speculative exigen- 
cies of his and later times. The light which 
criticism in the past had thrown on his path 
was eclipsed by his negative conclusions, be- 
yond the shadow of which he could never go, 
so that Grerrnan philosophy could not see and 
profit by the further developments of Science. 

YI. 

It is not our purpose to examine the Crit- 
ique of I'ure Reason and much less the com- 
ments of Criticism. We have referred, in a 
general way, to the history of Criticism previous 



Positivism and History of Philosophy . 307 

to Kant in order to show some relations of the 
age of criticism to the Positive philosophy of 
the present, notwithstanding that such relations 
are not as yet sufficiently appreciated by the 
philosophers of England. Kant terminated the 
criticism of knowledge, going beyond the rude 
and partial aspect in which it had been con- 
sidered in the eighteenth century, and investi- 
gating in one full conception of the spirit all 
that Locke and Leibnitz, Berkeley and Hume 
had partially affirmed. He demonstrated that 
experience, as such, is not possible without some- 
thing which, it is true, we receive, but which 
we also give, and that the unity of sensible data 
is accomplished in the spirit, and under the form 
of knowledge ; this, and its product, science, are 
produced by the harmony of that which thinks 
and that which is thought. The full perception 
of this truth based on reason, and to which the 
human mind had attained through a demonstra- 
tive series, was Kant's true merit. His mistake 
consisted in fearing too much the empiricism 
which had preceded him, and in removing the 
two terms of the fact of knowledge, the I and 



30S 



Ethics of Positivism. 



the object, so as to declare the relation between 
the two phenomenal. Criticism led him beyond 
the limits of the reasonable and the natural, for 
which he duly suffered. The theory of knowl- 
edge which, since Descartes, Criticism had 
fondly entertained, doing away with old super- 
stitions and academical notions of innate ideas, 
was about to be established, when Kant's anal- 
ysis reduced it to a cold and impalpable abstrac- 
tion. In the unproductiveness of this abstrac- 
tion, the last remnant of Criticism, lies the cause, 
we think, that has vitiated, from its origin, Ger- 
man philosophy, since Kant -and the Positive 
school. They are both branches of the same 
trunk, with the difference that, while Fiehte, 
Schelling and Hegel, starting from the negative 
conclusions of Kant, reserve the progress of 
this Criticism and partially cultivate it, Comte, 
on the contrary, proclaiming the p/ie?iome?io?i 
as the sole object of science, moves also from 
Kant, but, as the offspring of Sensualism and 
French materialism, he sees in phenomena only- 
elements of experience and empiricism, and 
drifts, in consequence, towards Hume and 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 309 

Locke. This is true of all the forms which his 
system has assumed in contemporary philoso- 
phy. If we accept German Positivism, which 
is at the bottom metaphysical, the sociology of 
the French, denying interior observation proper, 
amounts, as we have shown, to an historical 
mechanism, and the logical formalism of Mill, 
and the doctrines of Bain, Spencer, and Lewes, 
are brought back to the Sensualism of Locke, 
Hume and Hartley. We thus, finally explain 
how and why the first effect of the Positive 
spirit introduced among the English was to 
follow the tradition of the schools of the eigh- 
teenth century, and how and why such a tend- 
ency of thought was. implied in the empirical 
premises of Auguste Comte. 

til 

The movement of Positive thought implies, 
therefore, a double tendency. On one hand, 
the Positivists confine themselves to purely ex- 
perimental research, without realizing how much 
the very science which they teach owes to 



310 Ethics of Positivism. 

philosophy and criticism, or how ranch has been 
added to the theory of mind since Yico and 
Kant ; on the other, they labor under the disad- 
vantage of the Kantian postulate that phenomena 
are merely appearances, and of the postulate that 
the ideas of cause, subject and force give no 
validity to human reasoning. This ignorance, 
combined with a certain apprehension of their 
own negations, causes the Positivists to hold 
the most dangerous and certainly the least fruit- 
ful doctrines of the speculative mind, while it 
refutes the most durable and sound results which 
have been attained in the intellectual life of 
Europe since the time of Descartes. We have 
shown that, confining their observations to phe- 
nomena alone, Positivists cannot properly un- 
derstand them and cannot give a truly scien- 
tific value to the results of their observations. 
This is owing to the fact that the negations of 
Comte and Hume lead them to consider those 
phenomena as empty and cold abstractions. 
This insufficiency is apparent throughout their 
philosophy, but more especially in that part of 
their system which refers to moral nature, 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 311 

through the analysis of which we realize ever 
more the true nature of inner life. The phe- 
nomena of the moral world involve, let it be 
said, that something which enables us to see all 
other phenomena as implying forces the results 
of which all converge to that which transcends 
experience. An analysis of pure phenomena 
and generalities, which substitutes the temporal 
and spacial relations of facts for the action of 
real causes, and shows abstract symmetries 
of antecedents and consequents for the living 
and active laws of nature, will give us the sta- 
tistics and the inventory, as it were, of internal 
facts, but neither a science of the mind nor a 
system of morality proper. For, man cannot 
be solved into parts, nor can his being be re- 
duced to a mathematical formula, but, taken as 
he is, even as he is presented to our conscious- 
ness and as we know him through history, he 
must be considered in the living unity of his 
spirit. 

It is not surprising if other more manifest 
contradictions of Positivism follow from those 
just pointed out. Those who follow what they 



312 Ethics of Positivism. 

call a scientific method which leads beyond 
the proper province of criticism and of natural 
science, who reject speculative conclusions and 
care only for bare facts, are, in spite of them- 
selves, impelled to speculation when they real- 
ize that the foundations of those very facts 
are the difficult points in the problems of being 
and life. While Comte excluded the notions 
of force and cause from the province of science, 
a great work of synthesis raised the scientific 
mind ever more above the bare facts in its 
quest of the ideal, of the necessary, and of that 
objective reality which is attested more every 
day by the relations which physics and mathe- 
matics discover between the world of spirit and 
that of matter. Philosophy, that which grows 
out of scientific investigation, is the constant 
aspiration of man. Meanwhile the controversy 
between those who base their views on experi- 
ence and those who rely on reason, properly so 
called, continues ; and it is just this antagonism 
between naturalists and metaphysicians that pre- 
vents the seed of speculation from developing 
as it should, and bearing the fruit of the long 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 313 

cultivation of thought in the past. The vague 
consciousness which Positivism has of its tra- 
ditional relations to philosophy makes it at once 
negative and dogmatical. We say negative, 
because it prevents it from appreciating the 
true results of interior observation ; dogmat- 
ical, because the speculative course into which 
it is turned by an inexorable logic is wanting 
in the sure criteria which are required for the 
investigation of principles and methods and for 
the organization of knowledge. 



Till. 

It is important, therefore, that Positivism 
should become clearly conscious of the past 
of philosophy. From the fifteenth century to 
Kant, Criticism endeavored, as we have seen, 
to solve a vital problem, pursuing a series of 
researches which might be considered in the 
same sense that we would the middle term 01 
one argumentation, and the consciousness which 
underlies that course of inquiry does not seem 
to attain to its culmination until all those terms 



314 Ethics of Positivism. 

have been implied in scientific reflection. Kant 
halts at the last of those terms, at the idea 
of knowledge in the attempt to comprehend 
itself ; but while he lingers over the track of 
Hume and Berkeley, and admits the noumenon 
in opposition to the phenomenon, he does not 
go beyond the critical aspect of the problem. 
Since his time philosophy has not made any 
advance. Powerless under the enchantment 
placed over it by the sage of Konigsberg, phi- 
losophy dwells on the phenomenon, trying to 
find in it an explanation of both the world 
of ideas and that of facts. It is not too much 
to say that true progress in philosophy can be 
expected only on two conditions. We must 
go beyond the problem the solution of which 
appears to have been the sole object of Criti- 
cism, and we must have full and explicit knowl- 
edge of its results. While in most philosoph- 
ical schools the relation of thought to things, 
internal causality, the truths of reason and the 
moral absolute are denied, not by way of crit- 
icism, but on grounds of experience, and ac- 
cording to the Positive method ; while this 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 315 

equivocation of names and things lasts, and in 
our errors we are unconscious of traditions — it 
will be vain for us to hope that thought may 
come out of the narrow limits of empiricism 
to recognize science in that which relates to 
the higher topics of thinking. The influence 
of Criticism under which we have grown has 
stunted in us the sense of the real and of the 
natural ; it has become so much a part of our 
disposition that we ordinarily pursue a crit- 
ical course without fully realizing that we do; 
and we are confident that we are positive and 
experimental, while we are in reality skeptical 
and negative. We must sever our connection 
with this critical movement if we wish to judge 
it, and attain to results which have not been, 
and may never be, reached through its method. 
But this progressive step cannot be taken un- 
less we appreciate the relations of Criticism to 
contemporary thought, and especially to the 
Positive school of the day. 



316 



Ethics of Positivism. 



IX. 

In the course of our discussion we have 
noted more than once how the influence of 
Criticism, latent in the Positive method, causes 
a theory to be erroneously established on the 
data of experience. This is especially evident 
in the doctrines concerning the will, conscious- 
ness, ideas and good, and it is to be particularly 
observed in the views of the English philoso- 
phers who, objecting to many negative points 
of Comtism, have formed a broader conception 
of psychological observation. But we must 
bear in mind that the revival of the empirical 
doctrines of the eighteenth century could only 
have had the effect of basing psychology still 
more exclusively on what investigation through 
the senses would bring to light, in a country 
where, since Bacon and Hobbes, objective and 
metaphysical inquiries have almost always been 
pursued in accordance with experimental tradi- 
tion. This is proved in the history of inductive 
ethics, as we have outlined in the second part 
of this work. While the schools of Hobbes and 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 317 

of Locke were engaged on one side, and the 
so-called school of intuitionists, Hutcheson and 
the Scotch, on the other, in the great contro- 
versy on disinterested sentiments and moral 
ideas, none of those philosophers, excepting 
Clarke, Bntler and Wollaston, laid aside the 
question of feelings and affections, to find in 
absolute reason the principles of morality. 
Yet, such an idea, which is recognized in us 
as a datum of fact and undeniably of conscious- 
ness, would have been regarded by the intuition- 
ists as a crowning achievement worthy of the 
school which claims to explain morality by the 
theory of experience. 

X. 

As a resume of the course of contemporary 
Positive thought, we may say that, proceeding 
from Criticism, Positivism has accepted its nega- 
tions and adapted them finely to the Sensualism 
and doubt which prevailed in the eighteenth cen- 
tury ; and, while it has claimed to proceed by the 
experiential method and by a study of facts, it 
has accepted the words facts and experience in a 



318 Ethics of Positivism. 

sense which foreshadows the skepticism to which 
previous doctrines were to lead. The spirit of 
contradiction, which the new school has inher- 
ited as the effect of essentially different tenden- 
cies of thought, has always been its great defect. 
The occasion of this school was a time of mental 
weariness, and it was produced by the process 
of reasoning which developed from Descartes 
to Kant, and was revived in Hume and Locke. 
A negative diposition of the times, and an 
anxiety to inquire into facts, to discover their 
laws and apply them so that the constantly in- 
creasing wants of public and private life could 
be supplied by the progress of science, were 
favorable conditions for the development of the 
new tendency. But, although the new mode 
of thought at first seemed opportune to those 
who urged facts as the antidote of theories, it 
ceased to be so to many when it was seen that 
even the exclusive study of facts led inevitably 
to theories ; and although at first it sufficed to 
speak vaguely of experience and of experi- 
mental method to satisfy those who opposed 
metaphysics, it was necessary, in later times, 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 319 

to expose the postulates, the bounds and the effi- 
cacy of that method in order to satisfy serious and 
cautious minds. The change was not brought 
about by any strong movement in opposition 
to the new doctrine ; it was the effect of the 
slow, but efficacious and inexorable, work of 
thought, which saw, from the position to which 
a certain course of inquiry led, that a true or- 
ganism and form were yet to be given to Knowl- 
edge. How much and what the Positivists have 
contributed to the performance of the task, we 
trust we have comprehensively shown in these 
pages. The conception of the phenomenon, 
not as a living and causative reality in spirit and 
matter, but as an empty appearance, accessible 
to us through the senses, has made it impos- 
sible for that school to establish psychology, 
morality, the science of right, sociology and phy- 
sics so that they would explain the true causes 
and laws of the bare facts which constitute the 
subject-matter of those sciences. We have 
shown the result of their method. They have 
been engaged in researches without the guidance 
of principles, without certainty as to the end of 



320 Ethics of Positivism. 

their endeavors. They have discovered facts 
through fine analysis, but they have not shown 
the faculty of putting those facts in scientific 
synthesis. They have both denied and affirmed 
to such an extent that any one under their in- 
fluence might easily become a rude and power- 
less critic, whereas the method which they claim 
to pursue should make one an impartial ob- 
server. In fine, it seems unquestionable that, 
underlying the expressions of the Positive mode 
of thought, there are elements of philosophy 
which make every branch of science congenial, 
and the empirical element which, unopposed, 
might make it fruitless in the highest depart- 
ments of Knowledge. 

The results of prevailing doctrines confirm 
this statement. The English, who represent 
the best side of Positivism in Europe, do not, 
as we have seen, go beyond Hume. Their 
knowledge is most accurate in details, but it 
is nothing more than an improvement of the 
principle of induction advocated by Bacon. 
The sociology of Comte is still the vague sug- 
gestion of a method, and remains to be de- 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 321 

veloped into a true science. Finally, the 
materialism of all countries, with a very few 
exceptions, is the revival of the materialism 
of the eighteenth century, and does hot rec- 
ognize the most serious results of Criticism ; 
while absolute Idealism is so exhausted that it 
almost exclusively confines itself within the 
limits of history. There is, no doubt, a pro- 
found disturbance in science, which, at present, 
appears to be irremediable ; it is in the func- 
tions of assimilation and production, so that 
the real principle of phenomena cannot be seen 
behind the data of experience which science 
seems to accept almost exclusively. This short- 
sightedness is greatly due to the deep spirit of 
criticism, which prevents science from penetrat- 
ing far enough into facts to realize their most 
vital points. There is certainly the need of a 
remedy, which we cannot find outside of a doc- 
trine which will assume the Positive tradition 
of Kant without countenancing his negations — 
a doctrine which will rise above criticism with- 
out disregarding its best results, which may 
help to form one conception implying the inte- 



322 Ethics of Positivism. 

gration of the totality of the spiritual relations 
converging into consciousness. 

XL 

The question of the course which is to be 
pursued in the future is most important, inas- 
much as the movement of scientific thought 
bears upon public life. The old Europe of 
privileges and divine right has tottered and 
fallen, and upon the ideas of nationality and 
equality have arisen new states. The precau- 
tions which had been prescribed to thought 
in the Middle Ages have one by one been 
subjected to criticism. Art, literature and cus- 
toms have deviated from the traditional path. 
The very force of the new impetus annihilated 
the old ; but that which was old, and supported 
by the traditions of long ages, weakened and 
retreated before that stern and free spirit of 
inquiry which marked the Reformation and the 
Encyclopedia, until the human mind was brought 
face to face with the most terrible fact — the 
events of 1789. The French movement fol- 
lowed those of a similar nature in England 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 323 

and America ; but, compared to these move- 
ments, the French revolution was one of those 
violent shocks which hinder the slower, but 
more efficacious, work of nature in the social 
world. The cause of it is to be found in the 
French nature, which is the least apt to make 
profound and durable changes, and which has 
been, and perhaps still is, the most valid in- 
strument of revolution in Europe. The con- 
sequences of that revolution have been suffi- 
ciently realized in subsequent history. From 
the barbarous and instinctive policy of Napo- 
leon the First to the time of the foolish venge- 
ance of the treaties of 1815, from the move' 
ments of 1812 and from 1831 to 1848, from 
the last renovations in Italy to the war in 
Lombardy, the history of Europe presents a 
series of unexpected and confused, and often 
contradictory, movements, in which the author- 
ity of principles has almost always been with- 
out the sanction of facts. Never before had 
ideas, which have since been trampled upon, 
been invoked with more fervor. Both the peo- 
ple and the princes, in the face of violent and 



324 Ethics of Positivism. 

arbitrary measures, promised remedies implied 
in some doctrine. Even France, in 1831 and 
1849, remained passive while the principle of 
non-intervention was violated ; and not long 
since she attacked, in Germany, the same na- 
tional right and independence which a few 
years before she had sustained and defended 
in Italy. It is also noteworthy that, while 
much was justly said concerning the rights of 
the people, nearly all the principal movements 
in the cause of liberty and independence in Eu- 
rope could only be exercised in the name of the 
irrevocable necessity of the accomplished fact. 
It was by the mere barbarous force of events 
that society was modified ; but the solemn prin- 
ciples which regulate social relations have not 
yet received sufficient authority to penetrate to 
the foundations of society,, in order that the im- 
petus of social events may be properly checked. 

The influence of Positivism, besides mani- 
festing itself in Political life, begins to pervade 
the home atmosphere and society at large. The 
spirit of criticism has penetrated deeper than 
it would seem from the way in which it has pro- 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 325 

dueed so many changes in social forms. Along 
with a change in the conception of authority, 
and the weakening, if not almost extinguishing, 
of faith in the ideal, thus corrupting the artistic 
sentiment, and with a profound change in cus- 
toms and manners, there has been a change in 
the relations of the collective man and in the 
harmony of the faculties of the individual. 
History proves that new cravings in which orig- 
inate new individual wants, and which are an 
incentive to social disturbances, are generally the 
consequence of changes in our social relations. 
The cities, in which we live by the thousands 
and millions, engaged in hard work through the 
day, and seated in rooms artificially heated, or 
in unwholesome taverns in the evening, many 
of us without home or shelter, uncertain of the 
morrow, without faith, and beyond the soothing 
influences of nature, gradually destroy in us 
the keen sense of nature and of reality, and 
tend to make us lead a restless and, not seldom, 
guilty life. 

It should not be ignored that the very doc- 
trine which applied the latest results of criti- 



326 Ethics of Positivism, 

cism to science and philosophy threatens society 
with the extreme consequences of communism 
and socialism ; especially in France, where the 
authority of facts has always prevailed much 
more absolutely than elsewhere. As the reader 
knows, Auguste Comte promised, in his last 
work, a civil reconstruction on the principles 
of St. Simon and Fourier. We all remember, 
besides, how efforts have been made to realize 
this Positive Utopia in Paris and throughout 
France under the regime of the Commune. 
These are, for the present, merely symptoms, 
but they may be the symptoms of a tidal wave 
which may some day submerge us. Nor can 
society avert it without a gradual modification 
of its institutions ; for, social movements are 
also consequences of the universal law which 
transforms all things, and it is for science to 
discover its cause in order to prevent, if possi- 
ble, its most fearful effects, allowing nature to 
take its efficacious course without dangerous in- 
terruptions from revolutionary movements. The 
lower classes have improved, and begin to see 
that social advantages should be more equitably 



Positivism and History of Philosophy. 327 

enjoyed, and we can certainly not be indifferent 
to their claims. But reform cannot be con- 
fined to the institutions, for enough has been 
destroyed in the orders of faith, science and 
art; something must be substituted for all that 
has been taken away, and this something we 
will find through the proper study of nature 
and consciousness, the most solemn and sacred 
wants of which must absolutely be satisfied. 
Let us hope that the interest now manifested 
in this question is the indication of a movement 
of thought which, following ultimately the right 
course, will solve the great religious, philosoph- 
ical and moral problems which have so much 
weight on the future of man. 



